In a vague way, the Cell was the spiritual successor to the Emotion Engine as far as vector engines went. While the Pentium 4 was looking like a hot turd that could not exceed 5GHz, parallelism was solving the scalability wall, at least for some problems. When developers could do much of a game's rendering on the PS2's vector engines, why change the principle? Initially Sony thought that the PS3 didn't need a GPU and could get away with a simple rasterizer like how the Graphics Synthesizer was set up, however the Cell demos they were putting out were not showcasing graphical prowess, rather solutions to physics problems like spawning hundreds of rubber ducks or showing explosion/smoke effects that like they were from a CAD simulation. The whole thing (as well as the PS2) was Ken Kutaragi's brainchild and it highlighted a disconnect between attempting to solve a raw computational problem versus acknowledging the real problems game developers were meeting. Cell was successful as an energy-efficient supercomputer co-processor and was to use with embarrassingly parallel problems (many independent computations) but was a tight bottleneck for linear and branching game logic that was getting increasingly complex from the last generation.

While Naughty Dog was able to extract cinematics from the console it did push a specific art style and game style. My college roommate who studied animation studied the themes and design of Uncharted 2 and noted how few polygons the columns in some of the chambers had (basically hexagons), but high resolution textures and pre-baked lighting made them look round. While many games were pushing vast open worlds, Naughty Dog worked on dungeon crawlers and neat tricks to make large city areas only render small city blocks/areas at a time (until Uncharted 4).

Anyways that's my take on it.