Serious responses only, please.
I’m running a Nikon d500 right now, and for my next trick (largely in wildlife and portraiture), I’ve been thinking about the differences in crop factors, depth of field, and focal length, and my brain can’t brain no more, so please help me.
Nowadays, you can get a MFT with 20 mpx and use a 300mm that is a 600mm equivalent, and you can also get a medium format (like a GFX) where you could shoot with a 150mm and crop a fifth of the image to the same resolution.
Now, getting up to 9 stops between IBIS and OIS is a huge benefit, as does the computational photography stuff. No question. Having photos that don’t take up a whole damn hard drive is great too. So is being able to carry gear without needing a checked bag or buy gear without a second mortgage. I’m pretty much sold by those aspects, but I’m just not sure I understand the actual optics here.
Is there a practical reason related to optics why MFT would be a better choice for wildlife than cropping in on a medium format? Is inherently increased depth of field beneficial, detrimental, or irrelevant to capturing wildlife photos on a 300mm Oly or Panny rather than cropping in on a 150mm GFX? Or is the difference really up to those other elements I listed above (which are critical to the actual experience of shooting, but not about the practical performance characteristics of the sensor-lens combo)?