I think chasing photorealism also hurts the modding community, which hurts the players. No ordinary modding community could push out photorealistic contents in a realistic span of time. I think that's why we are seeing less and less mods nowadays comparing to the late 90s and early 2000s.
For FPS, HL2/Doom3 is probably the last generation that enjoys a huge modding community. Anything above it pushes ordinary modders away. I believe it is still quite possible to make mods for say UE4, but it just took such a long time that the projects never got finished.
In certain way, I so much wish the graphics froze by the year 2005.
I think it's fair to compare games to games though. Spending tons of $$ and time on shiny graphics features while totally ignoring the modding community (but I get that's probably because no one expects people to mod AAA games nowadays, unlike say 20-30 years ago) is a choice made by the developers.
For FPS, HL2/Doom3 is probably the last generation that enjoys a huge modding community. Anything above it pushes ordinary modders away. I believe it is still quite possible to make mods for say UE4, but it just took such a long time that the projects never got finished.
In certain way, I so much wish the graphics froze by the year 2005.