I am not peeved because people enjoy graphical realism or high fidelity graphics (for lack of a better term)...
I AM peeved because people who enjoy those things can't love anything else and constantly shit on games that look different or older. It's incredibly frustrating.
First of all, art direction is the most important aspect of graphical design in games IMO, and like... so many modern games have such shit art direction, but people love the looks because its vaguely "cool". Whereas games like Morrowind or Halo 1 or idk any slew of old RTSes are constantly derided as having bad graphics, because they have low poly count or weak anti-aliasing, but are incredibly immersive, allow you to suspend your disbelief, and retain their legibility even in the face of ultra realistic graphics--which is pretty impressive.
It's kind of like a music production vs composition issue, like okay sure, better sound quality is great, but if the song sucks--it sucks. Subjectively, ofc.
Besdies that, not every game needs to be realistic looking! I dont need to see the pores in peoples' skin in 99% of games, sure realism does help in the dark, psychological thrillers that have been hits in recent years, but most games AREN'T THAT. And it's not that every company is doing this, we got BOTW and Borderlands and Torchlight to name a few, but like this ridiculous amount of fan/consumer/gamer pressure to just keep maxing out graphical quality is setting games back so far. IMO, we got to a point in 2007 where like I really dont care how much more realistic it looks after that.
Content is suffering, both in quality and volume. Art direction is suffering. Gameplay and mechanics are suffering. Just to keep apace the tidal wave of realism, rendering effects, and framerate--none of which add anything to fun. And I get it, its fun to look out over a beautiful vista, but the effort the industry puts in to that is sapping the fun out of everything else. It sucks. And I am mad about it. And I will die mad about it.