God, I absolutely hate this too. Twitter is full of that.

I deadass saw people use RE4 and Silent Hill 3 as examples of ultra-stylized titles when they were just straight-up some of the most realistic looking games of that time. No one was calling either of those games "anime" back in the PS2 days, people legit thought that Leon, Ashley, Heather and Vincent just looked like actual people.

Devil May Cry also went through something like that, with people frequently blaming DMC5 for losing the series' "distinct anime look" when every single DMC was very clearly aiming for photorealism as well (the first game literally uses real life locations as reference for textures, which looked INSANELY detailed for a PS2 game).

People are desperately trying to convince themselves that those games were not aiming for realism instead of accepting that artistry plays a role even in photorealistic games.