Thanks, Adrian, for your reply. I know it didn't have to do with resolution, but I wanted to explain why projecting the basemap would be helpful. After posting here, I shot an email to the Utah State University GIS lab, here is the pertinent part of their reply:
In summary, you can digitize polygons from imagery in the Web Mercator projection, but as you mentioned, measurements/area calculations are not correct. Therefore, after you digitize your polygons from the basemap imagery, you will need to reproject those polygons to UTM NAD83 Zone 11N.
I did a quick test in ArcMap (not ArcGIS Pro). I created two ArcMap projects - one with the Web Mercator projection (WGS_1984_Web_Mercator_Auxillary_Sphere) and the other with the standard Utah UTM projection (UTM NAD83 Zone 12N). In both map projects, I used imagery that had been projected to two coordinate system of interest. I used AGRC basemap imagery (which is 2018 Google imagery) for the Web Mercator project and 2016 NAIP for the UTM project. In each project, I digitized an identical area in SLC and then calculated the area for both polygons. In the Web Mercator project, the area ended up being 3.549 sq km (prior to being reprojected) and in the UTM project, the exact same area was 2.042 sq km. So, clearly not the same!!! This suggests that Web Mercator is not good at providing accurate measurements.
However, when I reprojected the polygon that I created in the Web Mercator project to NAD83 UTM Zone 12N (and recalculated the area/geometry), the area was 2.036 sq km. The slight difference in the two values (2.042 vs 2.036) is attributed to my inability to digitize the area exactly the same. 😉
So, to answer your question, you can not reproject Esri basemap/Google imagery, but you can digitize data using basemap imagery. However, the key to getting more accurate measurements is to reproject your data when you are done and make sure you recalculate your area/geometry (i.e. update the area field in the attribute table)."
