I'm sure I'm not the first person to consider leaving out the RA8875 or similar and driving a AT070TN94 7" TFT 800 x 480 or similar direct from a uC such as ESP32 using latches yet I can't find any examples of anybody even trying this. Looking at the spec sheet it all looks doable with one serious caveat: DCLK frequency. The AT070TN94 spec sheet lists the minimum DCLK frequency as 26.4 MHz but this speed wouldn't be possible to achieve with bitbanging on a simple uC.
Is the high clock frequency really a recommendation so display updates will happen quickly or is that minimum frequency really required to make the display show any images at all? My application is to show only one image continually so as long as the image doesn't flicker or dim I don't need a high display update rate. I don't know if, like CRTs, there is a display refresh rate and the image will dim/flicker unless constantly updated, in which case a min DCLK freq in the 10s of MHz then makes sense.
https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/AT070TN94.pdf