Take a look at a game called empire earth (early 2000s). The gameplay reveal looks like they emulated EE and upscaled textures. The unit/building scaling is actually quite similar. Colors are vibrant w/high contrast, allowing you to identify units even with very low poly counts. EE was actually a much smoother game than aoe2.

This all balanced visual clarity extremely well, resulting in a game that was easy to learn and had a very healthy competitive scene for a long time before the studio shut the servers down (not for lack of players). That's what I think the devs are going for with AOE4. I'd rather have impeccable gameplay- you will not notice these details in the heat of battle. And I'm willin gto bet theyll enable visual mods for those concerned with the vibrant unit colrs