Varying pixel sizes, pixels offset from their natural grid, and even rotated pixels were actually not uncommon in retro games. Take a look at just about any SNES game that did advanced Mode 7 effects, like Pilot Wings or Super Mario Kart, and you'll see examples of pixels being rendered at varying scales outside their native resolution.
It's not the same look as modern games, because the screen resolution was much lower than what we have today, but to me, high resolution rendering of transformed low resolution sprites is a perfectly valid successor aesthetic. It's not the same as what a game would have looked like in the 90s, but as others have pointed out in this thread, neither are crisp full-color pixels rendered as perfect squares. It's all an interpretation.
On the other hand, what I cannot abide are "low poly" models that use polygons other than triangles and convex quads. I will die on this hill.
The way smooth parallax and sometimes different pixel sizes (!) show up in “retro” games is a huge pet peeve of mine.