Last week I looked into such simplification/decimation algorithms to simplify lines sent to a showlaser projector. Turns out there is a whole bunch of different algorithms for decimation, each with different trade-offs.

It might be interesting to see how the edge cases mentioned in the article are impacted by switching to, for example, Visvalingam-Whyatt [0].

[0]: For a Python implementation: https://github.com/urschrei/simplification