The quality of directional light shadows in 2020 is not great. Playing around with settings just shifts the artifacts around.
Does URP in 2021 improve the quality of shadows for directional lights? I saw in the release notes a mention of point light shadows, but I’m looking for higher quality shadows from a directional light.
Would be 100% happy if they matched the quality of the shadows in the built in render pipeline.
If you mean using a close fit instead of sable fit, then no; that has not changed. The advice I was given was to use cascaded shadow maps (expensive, but might kinda sorta mitigate the problem) and/or break apart large shadow-casting geometry into smaller chunks (a major burden on the content side of things depending on how you’re creating your scenes).