[mschuetz]

You're skillfully dodging the point: Trilinear filtering is in no way an "ideal" alternative.

It has worse quality than something like a Lanczos filter, and it requires computing image pyramids first, i.e., it is also slower for the very common use case of rescaling images just once. And that article isn't really about projected/distorted textures, where trilinear filtering actually makes sense.