> It's increasingly hard to watch mainstream films with practical effects or animal actors. Even though most audiences would vastly prefer the real deal, they just put up with it.

I (mostly) prefer today's special effects to the ones in the past. The old ones would take me out of the moment, because I'd notice that it was a special effect. (IE, in the original Star Wars movies you can see the matt lines on VHS, and the strings on the C3P0 puppet in the desert. Really distracting.)

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A few more points:

A lot of the article reminds me of how recording artists would complain, in the 2000s and 2010s, that they would put a lot of effort into a recording, and then most people were listening to it on a sh*tty MP3. The recording artists didn't understand their audiences. It's hard to know if it's a case where the video game artists don't understand the audiences, or the tool (AI) really isn't bringing value to the process.

> It's easy to envision a similar future where the budget for art simply isn't there in most offerings, and we're left praising mediocre holdout auteurs for their simple adherence to traditional form

I'm not sure what you mean by that.