There is absolutely no shortage in the compositing world of people implementing their own version of it. For Nuke there is the same plethora of people going for this. I understand it, the end result looks much better than a simple gaussian blur.
The Basu and Su paper above is the only one I found which kind of tries to rationalize why it might look better (the argument goes a bit in the direction of ‘it looks more constant when changing the viewing scale and we see that in the fourier spectrum of the first derivative of the image there is some self-similarity to the fourier spectrum of the image itself’).
The Fusion user base is small, but full of nice and humble people! 