When I was a youngling, graphics improved quickly and that made older games look worse by every year. What initially looked amazing and “life-like” turned dated in just a couple of years, however it seems graphics has plateaued in the last ten-ish years.
I would say that we reached the point of diminishing returns around next-gen GTA V / MGS V. Not that you can’t see the difference between those and modern games, but it’s nowhere the leap from San Andreas to GTA IV.
I recently started playing MGS V again and I’m shocked at how good it still looks, compare it to RDD 2 and you would probably need a side by side comparison to see the extra detail.
We have finally reached a point where old games dont get less immersive because our baseline in visual fidelity keeps increasing, or if it does it’s atleast a lot slower.
Dont think this is an unpopular opinion. I can happily play most any game made in the last 15 years and be pretty happy, and if the OG game was pretty plain there’s always modders (like, morrowind/system shockn2 or freespace mods make a huge difference for that age of game) I was just watching GDQ today and surprised by well some games over a decade old just look… Perfectly fine. I find myself Turing rtx on and off a bit to figure out what difference it’s actually making - i believe rtx is a bigger win forndev workload than the quality increase for gamers. (Don’t get me wrong, full glass/water/puddke reflections are incredible, but it’s a lot of $$$ for the visual jump)
I think the unpopular opinion here is specifically that the graphics plateue is a good thing, though I do agree with you that OP’s justification for it isn’t the best