See, those images you posted are exactly what I'm saying. It's just gotten to the point where where it becomes almost impossible for something to look better if we were to just go off of something like a model for a single asset from game to game. The focus then has to turn to "Does the detail in everything else match up" within each game? In a game like Fallout, I think you'd agree that it mostly doesn't.
If we're to go by debating if it's "next gen" looking or not, then you have to ask yourself what do you expect next generation to look like. I personally think we entered an era of diminishing returns in terms of impact in the overall look of things at the beginning of the current generation, which to me wasn't a massive leap over the previous one. There's only so much work an artist can do to something before we get to the point that only the minutia of detail can improve it. I mean, developers now have technology and rendering engines in games that can use photogrammetry techniques to scan a real life object and have it presented in the game exactly as it looks in real life. Photo-real. The obvious caveat is the lighting solutions, surface materials and overall IQ. Without a true ray tracing solution (RTX is trying to remedy this, but it's still nowhere near as accurate as a proper offline ray-trace engine) then we're not going to get that impact again when jumping from generation to generation. The only thing we can expect is more detail. More interaction with the worlds, and more dynamic systems with physics and animations. Aesthetically, from a rendering point of view, John Carmack said the only way real time engines can make another big stride forward is through shader materials. Artists already have all the tools they need to produce things to the extremes of their ability. It's just a question of budget, both financially and development wise. It's also a question of effort. There's no magic button to press that can magically make everything look on par.
So, when next generation comes about, what do we expect we're going to be seeing when we've got games now that are pushing the threshold? Something like Ghost of Tsushima already looks like it could be a so called next generation game. Not because it looks amazing artistically - which it does - but because of how dynamic everything is with the wind blowing, affecting everything with it. The world stops being static and comes to life when that happens, and that to me has a bigger impact visually than higher res textures.
