I said “beautiful”, not “realistic”.
Realism in games (especially strategy games) is overrated, because it breaks things like colour theory and makes it harder to pick out salient details.
People forget: we view the world at much larger viewport sizes than most people have monitors 
That’s true, but one thing doesn’t negate the other… Age of Empires 4 doesn’t have bad graphics, but there’s always room for improvement…
There’s always room for improvement. For example, Croissantini does a great job of highlighting all the little issues (that when added up, could have a real cumulative impact).
That’s different from completely changing the art style of the game just because some gamers for some reason associate “realism” with “good graphics”.
Something can be realistic and have good graphics. Something can be realistic and cause a mess, especially for strategy games which are viewed in an isometric (or some form of top-down) camera where you can see a lot of things at once, in a way you wouldn’t in FPS or TPS games.
Civilisation VII is facing a lot of criticism on a lot of levels (not that I personally agree with all of it), and one of those is that in their quest to make the game look more realistic (which they have, and the graphical fidelity is amazing), it’s become harder to read. A not-insignificant amount of criticism over the art direction in that game is that (among other things) it makes the map feel too “cluttered”.
Yes, it’s because Civ 7 was made more realistic due to criticism of Civ 6’s cartoonish aesthetic, so they returned to a style more similar to Civ 5… but the biggest criticism of Civ 7 was the age system, which severely limited the number of civilizations, and that’s why in the last patch they reverted to the classic Civilization style…
I know why it was made more realistic. I played VI, I liked VI. I play VII, I like VII. I prefer VI’s art direction to VII (even if VII is beautiful, especially close-up).
The criticism about the aesthetics backfired, though. One of many such cases.
And yes, I’m aware of the complaints about Age Transitions. And no, the last patch did not revert to anything. It let players carry their civilisation / cultural choices through Transitions. Transitions still remain, the game is still in Ages.
Personally I think they did a very good job keeping to their design ethos while accommodating players put off by mandatory civilisation-switching, but that nothing to do with aesthetics 
Yes, I’m not complaining about the aesthetics of Civ 6 either; it’s beautiful and it was also a nod to Civ Revolution, which was also somewhat cartoonish…
god i hate AI generated imagery
always the same bland tasteless look from it