I actually think cutting edge graphics make a game worse and we've been at that point for a while now. Why? Because gameplay has been butchered. There is a lot less variety among the leading games now. That is because the budgets are too high. Studios can't take risks easily because there is too much at stake. I think only first party studios take risks on their games, because the risks of launching hardware are even bigger. So they take risks, but third party companies don't. They play it safe and actually cut a lot of corners in other areas.
A good example is Final Fantasy 7 Remake. First they have to go back to their most successful Final Fantasy title, because the risks are too high. But the game only goes through Midgar now, when that is about 15% of the original game. That is just to illustrate how much you are missing because of the focus on graphics.
Indies are still innovative, but they have extremely low budgets compared to AAA games. I actually prefer something in the middle, a game that takes risks but still has a decent budget. My "sweet spot" is probably Breath of the Wild. To me the game looks beautiful, but I can tell they saved some money by not going for realistic graphics. And more importantly the game took a lot of risks. They could have easily alienated their core fanbase by taking risks that big. Another good example is Demon's Souls. Sony almost didn't publish this game originally, because it looked terrible when they first saw it. The reality was they had spent almost all of their development time on the gameplay and they just fixed up the graphics in the end. So the game looked good at the end, but graphics wasn't really their focus and their budget was a lot lower than other "big" games at that time. I would like to see more of this from AAA studios. Put the focus on gameplay and keep the graphics good but not cutting edge.
So, I'm not really looking forward to graphics upgrades, because that ends up hurting the gameplay a little bit more every generation. I want to see more gameplay leaps and less graphical leaps.
