Did the 2020 DNC already happen?

My question is not meant to be inflammatory or conspiratorial. I am simply wondering whether the tedious montage of speeches, many of them given outdoors, broadcast on cable television on Tuesday night as the "Roll Call Across America" was the actual mechanism by which Joe Biden was nominated as the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate.

My reading of the bylaws does not give me any indication that schmaltzy prerecorded video clips can take the place of the tedious process outlined in this and other documents. Figuring out what words like "present" and "the floor" mean in the current environment is difficult enough, but even by the standards of Robert's Rules-style meetings held over Zoom what we saw on Tuesday was not a formal meeting. It was a long television commercial.

Was an actual procedural roll call conducted earlier in the day (or the week) via teleconference, or was it taking place off-camera during the broadcast itself? Logistically speaking even that is difficult to imagine. There were 3,979 pledged delegates to this year's convention. The most expensive Zoom subscription allows for a maximum of 500 participants, just barely enough to host California's 494-person delegation. There is no obvious way that anything that took place remotely could have borne any meaningful resemblance to the party's actual convention rules. It is interesting that no journalist as far as I am aware has looked into this question.

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What was the alternative, though? Would it really matter if there had been no convention at all and Biden's nomination as this year's Democratic presidential candidate had simply been announced by fiat? Political conventions are a relic of a bygone era in which primaries, if they were held at all, were meaningless straw polls and candidates were chosen by party elites behind closed doors.

I, for one, welcome a digital return to smoke-filled rooms.