It is still important, and jet certainly has major flaws. I just think it's not so useful to compare jet to non-divergent colormaps. Any divergent colormap would look bad on a photograph of a human, which seems to be the main evidence provided in this paper.
In a deleted reply to my comment, a user referenced a paper by Borkin [1], that actually compares the quality of decisions made using jet vs other divergent colormaps. Jet loses. It's a shame this sort of argument wasn't included in the ncomms article, because imo it would do a much better job of convincing people who like jet.
I think the reason the example with the photo is useful is because it shows how the colourmap creates features where none exist in the data (due to the nonlinear gradient). When looking at the photo with Jet I can see discrete areas of flat colour, like the Obama 'Hope' poster, but really these boundaries are just artifacts of the colourmap.
I think the same thing happens in the arteries example in that SciPy talk. Sure it could be useful in some scenarios to highlight specific parts of the spectrum (like you mentioned with small deviations from the zero point) but at the end of the day the colourmap doesn't know anything about the data and shouldn't make any assumptions. Highlighting certain small intervals in the data could be better achieved with preprocessing, i.e. some polynomial scaling function.
If you look at the photo of Curie using any divergent colormap, you get roughly the same effect. The problem is that the colormap is divergent and replaces white with a dark color, not anything intrinsic to jet. If you map this image with BWR or roma you end up with similarly unappealing results.
IMO roma is actually the worst of the bunch, despite being the most 'scientific.' Whoever decided that deep, saturated blue and dull brown-red are equally distinct from beige needs to reevalute their model of color perception.
> I just think it's not so useful to compare jet to non-divergent colormaps.
I agree, in the "this should be so obvious that it doesn't need an article written about it" sense. But the continued prevalence of jet used as a sequential colour map suggests that the comparison is necessary.
In a deleted reply to my comment, a user referenced a paper by Borkin [1], that actually compares the quality of decisions made using jet vs other divergent colormaps. Jet loses. It's a shame this sort of argument wasn't included in the ncomms article, because imo it would do a much better job of convincing people who like jet.
[1] https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~kgajos/papers/2011/borkin11-in...