As well as how this whole "PSX/Pixelated/heckkin wholesome chungus 100" style is inherently childish and made by arrested development gooner faggots who never left the mindset of a gooner teenager for gooner faggot teenagers.
Now I'm not saying Sea of Stars has bad pixel art, but look at the trees and surrounding environment in that forest shot. This was developed with trying to push realistic visuals in mind on 16-bit hardward. With Sea of Stars, you can just tell it's current year pixelart with the more flatly colored, cartoony environment, with a more... I wanna say limited/washed out color palette? Like it just looks so much less defined compared to 16 bit spriteart.
I think part of it is that these indie devs anchor themselves to specific styles/themes regardless of the medium they're using. As stated before, you had full-on illustrations being downscaled to fit within sprite limitations, like Ayami Kojima's iconic Castlevania artwork. You don't really see troons or TwiXer-addicted indie devs trying to branch out and try and follow her style now, do you?
From my perspective, creators have to always keep in mind the kinds of themes, tone, and mood they want to convey through their art, regardless of what format they use. Deciding whether to use sprites, illustrations, low-poly models, or high-fidelity realistic graphics is similar to deciding between drawing a picture on a small piece of paper vs. a canvas. You have dozens of ways to make art, but it's not gonna change the overall "core" of what you're trying to convey through that art.
To address the Sea of Stars example, take for example Secret of Mana's box art; easily one of the most beloved covers of its era:
It's not quite "photorealistic" per say, but it still does a fantastic job of capturing the lush scenery of a giant tree and the surrounding lake and plant life. I feel a lot of games made with old hardware weren't setting out to make realistic stuff all the time, because they also had to take into account art direction; How to best convey the tone and mood of the game in question in a way that will resonate with people. You had the sprite artists at Square making sprites with tons of depth because that's the artstyle they felt best complimented the stories they wanted to tell. Meanwhile, you had Shiny Entertainment breaking ground with scanning in hand-drawn animations in games like Earthworm Jim to make them feel that much more cartoony.
Now compare that to the key art from Sea of Stars:
It looks like a friccin mid-2010s Cartoon Network show. And even if the devs had access to old hardware dev kits and CRT TVs, that wouldn't change the fact that their pixel art would not step outside those conventions. Nothing will change the fact that you drew a Steven Universe-looking cast of characters or tried to replicate Steven Universe-looking backgrounds, regardless of whether you painted it on a canvas, or drew it on a piece of printer paper.
So, why do they do this? Probably because it's all they know. These people went to California-based Colleges or other progressive-based institutions for education, this is the best they were taught, and they didn't want to go any further than that. Or maybe they think trying to replicate the more painting-esque style is too "outside their comfort zones". The Tumblr generation is one of complacency. It's why people like Kosher call them lazy. They think they can just get by by taking what little they know and tossing it into a low-poly PS1 game or a 16-bit SNES game without wanting to push themselves any further, cause Tumblr taught them that their imperfections are to be celebrated, not improved upon.
![LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]](http://uploads.kiwifarms.st/data/avatars/l/61/61177.jpg?1699571951){kind=avatar}
pulls off this look very well. One of the few low poly games that still looks good today.
