The point of data presentation is to gist the most salient trends; an interactive chart where you can zoom in to the lowest granularity of the data basically de

The point of data presentation is to gist the most salient trends; an interactive chart where you can zoom in to the lowest granularity of the data basically defeats the purpose of the plot in the first place. Similarly most animation in charts doesn't really add any meaningful visual data, it's just distracting. I think most consumers of data journalism got pretty bored of scrolling through some massive viz after only a few minutes, and why would they not? People read the news to have the critical points surfaced for them. They don't want to dig through the data themselves (and if they do they're not going to be satisfied with the prebuilt animation). These kinds of things are IMO more fun and interesting to build, rather than to actually try and learn something from.