I’d consider the criticism more uncanny valley type stuff - because it looks of a certain quality the flaws are more evident. It seems for the most part the excellence here is in the art design taking advantage of modern GPUs and the criticism is warranted from a technical perspective.
I think this is it. When the games are less realistic overall, the mind can still suspend disbelief. And in fact it often does; so low-fi everywhere is all accepted and forgotten.
Who hasn't read a book (or in the HN crowd, also played a text MUD) and become completely lost in the fictional world?
But once we hit that near-perfect, we stop suspending our disbelief (or the bar is raised near the top); so the imperfections which are detectable become jarring.
