Always always always painted.

People should educate themselves though. It can be really fucking easy to paint tabletop standard miniatures these days. There's many more tools to do so than in the 90s.

I'm talking coloured primers and Marine Juice, with selected drybrushing and choosing the right paints out of the bottle for coverage.

A lot of the time I think the problem is people kind of run before they walk and start "experimenting" with highlights and freehand and weird basing schemes and stuff without stopping and thinking. And that's all good and well, I did it when I was 12 too.

But there are routes to painting stuff that looks pretty good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHm8YW4cQE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4x0El5xOxU