It's a big enough issue that id software would still rather use software virtual texturing than a hardware implementation ... 

That's HOW bad tiled resources are ... 

Practically no devs care about the feature anymore since it has too many limitations. 16K*16K is the maximum size of a sparse texture which is really small so we'd want another hardware feature such as seamless texture stitching to rectify this. 64K page sizes are too coarse, you want smaller granularity like 16K. Not all implementations support multisampled textures/texture arrays and page sizes for those are also implementation dependent. Another limitation of sparse textures is that each texture page has to backed by it's own memory, we could instead have 'tile pool' which is shared with many sparse textures allowing for new ways of doing texture compression ... 

All on top of the above, there's a lot of stalling with respect to changing tile mappings since it has to be done on the CPU ... 

Software virtual texturing has complications with texture filtering and some memory allocation overhead but at least it's more performant to deal with software indirection than CPU roundtrip stalls ... (tiled resources is straight up unusable for real-time rendering) 

it was

Hardware wont be the problem but the fact that there is only so much you can do as your budget/stuff allows
Games like Horizon, Uncharted 4, Bloodborne, Driveclub is the maximum you can get out of human beings lets be honest here, unless you want to have 1000 people working on a single game somewhere in china for even less pay and more work.
Its pretty likely that the next generation will have 60fps @4K at least as far as first party is concerned.

Mobile and PC developers do not do this all the time. They just develop for the lowest spec device they're willing to support, or build their engines to deal with bloated APIs rather than "to the metal" optimizations you see that give consoles performance advantages vs equivalent PC hardware.

Just look at how many studios not ran by Sony are actually putting a reasonable effort into supporting the PS4 Pro. It's practically none, because they have little to no reason to put the extra effort in.

I think people tend to forget that power alone isn't the only limiting factor in a game's graphics. Money and manpower can be bottlenecks as well; imagine building a whole game like GTA with every asset up to the standard of movie CGI, the amount of manhours and resources it would take is simply insane. It would probably take a team of thousands working for a decade at a cost of billions.

I think sharing generic assets or using procedural shaders (think No Man's Sky or partially Horizon: Zero Dawn) are going to become more common in the future to solve that issue ... 

I just hope that doesn't lead to visual homogeneity where we keep seeing the same assets in multiple games, or where overall variety is clearly limited by a set of templates that are simply remixed as seen in No Man's Sky.

I guess that would sort of depend on how customized the studio wants their art design to be plus there's probably enough variety that it would be pretty hard to remember the same exact assets used across games when there's also modification involved with those assets too making it even harder to recognize them ... 

Shaders can also affect the way assets look too despite featuring the same geometry and textures as well so it's permutation hell to be able to pick up the specific patterns ... 

I'd assume that it's sequels or other entries in the same franchise who will reuse assets the most obviously from the last iteration but it's fine since that's what customers expect ...

Not all graphics effects actually increase development time and costs. Some do the complete opposite as well.

Well I certainly can't dispute your experience =p Not only is the hardware still advancing in some manner, but the techniques and algorithms used are are getting better and better too. I hope that I get to see what you're describing :)