> My limited understanding is that Nerfs are compute-heavy because each cloud point is essentially a small neural network
There's no point cloud in NeRFs. A NeRF scene is a continuous representation in a neural network, i.e. the scene is represented by neural network weights, but (unlike with 3D Gaussian Splatting) there's no explicit representation of any points. Nobody can tell you what any of the network weights represent, and there's no part of it that explicitly tells you "we have a point at location (x, y, z)". That's why 3D Gaussian Splatting is much easier to work with and create editing tools for.
There's no point cloud in NeRFs. A NeRF scene is a continuous representation in a neural network, i.e. the scene is represented by neural network weights, but (unlike with 3D Gaussian Splatting) there's no explicit representation of any points. Nobody can tell you what any of the network weights represent, and there's no part of it that explicitly tells you "we have a point at location (x, y, z)". That's why 3D Gaussian Splatting is much easier to work with and create editing tools for.