Good to know about. This was also my intuition, that there must still exist ways to blast pixel data quickly, but it's not the "happy path" in modern graphics API's.
Blasting pixel data from the CPU to the GPU is normally about as "happy path" as it gets. The entire architecture is designed to make that kind of operation super efficient and super fast.
It's the opposite direction (GPU to CPU) which is a pain in the ass. Still fast if you do it correctly, but it's easy to end up with a stall.
