I am probably unqualified to speak about this, as I am using an RX 550 low profile and a 768P monitor and almost never play newer titles, but I want to kickstart a discussion, so hear me out.
The push for more realistic graphics was ongoing for longer than most of us can remember, and it made sense for most of its lifespan, as anyone who looked at an older game can confirm - I am a person who has fun making fun of weird looking 3D people.
But I feel games' graphics have reached the point of diminishing returns, AAA studios of today spend millions of dollars just to match the graphics' level of their previous titles - often sacrificing other, more important things on the way, and that people are unnecessarily spending lots of money on electricity consuming heat generating GPUs.
I understand getting an expensive GPU for high resolution, high refresh rate gaming but for 1080P? you shouldn't need anything more powerful than a 1080 TI for years. I think game studios should just slow down their graphical improvements, as they are unnecessary - in my opinion - and just prevent people with lower end systems from enjoying games, and who knows, maybe we will start seeing 50 watt gaming GPUs being viable and capable of running games at medium/high settings, going for cheap - even iGPUs render good graphics now.
TLDR: why pay for more and hurt the environment with higher power consumption when what we have is enough - and possibly overkill.
Note: it would be insane of me to claim that there is not a big difference between both pictures - Tomb Raider 2013 Vs Shadow of the Tomb raider 2018 - but can you really call either of them bad, especially the right picture (5 years old)?
Note 2: this is not much more that a discussion starter that is unlikely to evolve into something larger.
I already wrote another comment on this, but to sum up my thoughts in a top comment:
Most (major) games nowadays don’t look worlds better than the Witcher 3 (2015), but they still play the same as games from 2015 (or older), while requiring much better hardware with high levels of energy consumption. And I think it doesn't help that something like an RTX 4060 card (power consumption of a 1660 with performance slightly above a 3060) gets trashed for not providing a large increase in performance.
I wish they played more like games from the late 90's, early 2000's, instead of stripping out a lot of depth in favor of visuals. Back then, I expected games to get more complex and look better. Instead, they've looked better, but played worse each passing year.
Part of this is also just the fact that simpler = broader appeal to a lot of companies which translates to more money.
I sometimes I question if it's just that, or if it's also due to the fact they generally employ like a hundred artists to make models and textures and what not, but only have like 5 people doing the programming. Why is it not an even mix? Even if simplicity was a good thing, I'm pretty sure there would be fewer technical issues if they had more people doing the technical things and not just creating more visual assets. It's not just the complexity of the game mechanics that has suffered, it's the quality and general stability of the software, too, that has declined.
Then again, the games I would like to see come back from back in the day were made by small teams. Bigger teams can also be problematic in and of themselves. Communication issues, versioning, making sure everything actually connects together when they are made by separate departments, etc. When it's one dude with a vision and passion, it can actually be a better thing than something made by a huge team of thousands of people. 🤷🏻♂️