When people say that I think they mean they want games to look like this:

Image

Or like this.

So, still atmospheric and beautiful, but low poly enough that artists don’t have to spend so much time creating detail. Sort of like an impressionistic painting.

To be honest though for most AAA games I think its animations and highly choreographed gameplay sequences that are bottlenecking development more than the art is. Look at games like cyberpunk and fallout 76: they largely didn’t have unfinished art assets (in fact the art assets in both those games, particularly the environments, look quite good). Instead they had broken animations and gameplay systems. I guess art style does play a roll in that though, as a more realistic model kinda demands more realistic animations to avoid looking weird. If a character is a low rez blocky mass representing a person it doesn’t look that weird if they teleport into a car, but if they’re nearly photorealistic you suddenly need a highly detailed animation of them opening the car door and climbing inside, one for each size and shape of car that exists. You also need a system that can smoothly transition the character from standing there to playing that “entering car” animation without it jerking or looking weird. And you need to tweak their pathfinding to make sure the way the character walks up to the car looks natural, so they don’t approach from an odd angle that would demand the aforementioned system rotate them in an unnatural way to get them lined up.

Now multiply all those concerns with everything a character needs to interact with in however many gameplay sequences or environments they exist in. Instead of just creating some level geometry and plopping down some NPC entities now making a level is an entire ordeal.