I mean... the new consoles are weak. They always are - that's why they're 400 bucks and not 800-1200 like a upper-high-end PC with a higher-end GPU. Consoles exist to give you the same game experience as everyone else on the platform for a reasonable price.
The article kind of implies that they made the graphics look amazing, but then scaled them down for parity though, not that they just made the graphics worse right off the bat.







