>>533799121
The fact no game with a painted 3D aesthetic exists yet even though it seem obvious has me worried that there’s something terrible about it I’m missing

So in television, at first animation was cheap and live action was expensive, so animation was for children’s shows and garbage. Eventually the costs flipped, and now there are “prestige animation” shows and movies like Arcane or whatever.
In video games, photorealistic has been the goal and hyper stylized the realm of mobile trash forever. Increasingly though, photogrammetry, gaussian splatting, and texture generation is getting so cheap/easy that even a solo dev can have borderline-perfectly-photorealistic static and background objects, and metahuman has trivialized the process of making photo-perfect characters.
I think within the next 1-3 years photorealism is finally going to stop being seen as the holy grail, and there are going to be award-winning AAAs with full on cartoon and watercolor aesthetics.