I'm of that mind that on a pure fidelity level things are better but there's more and more people calling the shots who don't know how to make a pleasing image.
It's not quite the whole art style carries visual but it's in the same ballpark. No one is gonna deny that Crysis's style is realism but it still holds up today in my randomfaggot opinion despite, objectively, being "inferior" in a pure fidelity sense. Everything just comes together to be nice to look at.
Big graffix =/= looks good essentially.