I have 3 .tif files of a Natural Earth world map, each representing the bands of the source NE world map.
I run gdalbuildvrt -a_srs EPSG:4326 -separate rgb.vrt red.tif green.tif blue.tif
to create a VRT. The output VRT file is incorrectly placed and its upper left corner is placed exactly the center of the input.tif files.
However, when I run the same process using a subset of the NE map, the output VRT file is correctly placed. The images are not split in half, I'm just using the Map swipe tool.