Sounds more like a tooling issue. The tech exists, the hardware can run it but the tools don't exist to make it feasible in a reasonable timeframe/with a reasonably sized dev team. Corners are being cut on optimization or relying on hardware brute forcing it.

Anno 1800 looks great, better than all the previous titles and is definitely a plus

I guess normies still equate graphic quality with overall game quality, so that's why there's such a big emphasis on photorrealism for many AAA games. An old colleague from university, ~2010, only liked to play the shiniest, "best looking" stuff and scoffed at 2D games, "we're way past super nintendos".

Fuck cutting-edge graphics

They pushed this on us so they can make us buy new video cards every other year.