I'm curious as to why the video quality of video conferencing tools is so bad... (alternative?)

I've researched this a lot and the reason Zoom is limited to 720p and most video conferencing tools are too is because the technology isn't there yet to support 1080p or higher resolutions. It is literally impossible for current hardware to encode higher than 720p video data in realtime and decode it on the other end. To video conference at 1080p or above would require custom hardware video encoders on both ends and a dedicated 10 Gigabit Ethernet cable link which defeats the point of remote video calls.