I tried it in quality mode, it's not solid. Only two games this gen I can think of off the top of my head have quality modes so good that they feel smooth and don't effect the camera is Alan Wake 2 and Expedition 33. In Rebirth it slightly effects camera movement and the frames aren't paced evenly so it feels worse than it actually is. 

The PS5 version had an image quality that is decidedly "sub 1080" looking in performance mode despite the higher resolution on paper.

I didn't mind it on my old 1080p display, this is actually the one instance where quality mode felt very choppy and unplayable (much worse than TotK). Performance mode image quality is definitely poor in side by side comparisons, but I keep getting less sensitive to resolutions as I grow older.

Image quality on Switch 2 could actually end up better thanks to DLSS. Performance mode on PS5 almost looks bugged out upon close inspection, which explains the unusually massive clarity gap between it and PS5 Pro version.

PS4 Remake's "the door" and PS5 Rebirth's "Vaseline filter" are such mysteries!

I gave up playing Jedi Survivor on quality mode when I was exploring Koboh and there was a cave with water, tons of enemies and lots of reflections. It was a unplayable mess with fps in the 10s.

Rebirth though I'm playing it in quality mode because the performance mode just looks terrible lol. It's bizarre because I know FF16 can get as low as 720p native in the performance mode but I don't remember it being that blurry. I know, different engines and all, but still.

Yeah, I there are one or 2 rough spot which causes the RT to tank the frame rate around water.

FF16 uses FSR2 to improve sharpness and FF7 Rebirth has something going wrong in the post production pipeline which makes it look too soft but not lower than 900p. But essentially it's a fault of the the developers side and not even the engine (VII remake also uses UE4)

Rebirth is evenly frame paced but it lacks any camera motion blur so is choppier than usual. I actually stopped noticing after a while but this was a point of contention. FF16 was actually too high on the motion blur angle but a patch allowed control over it. Loved FF16 at 30fps.

And people are paying more, look at the current preorders for full physical games vs the shady bullshit key cards. 

It's not really arbitrary. I and many others just find certain types of games genuinely unpleasant to play at that fps. For me it doesn't matter much when it's a game like Undertale but for 3D games with a lot of camera movement the choppiness looks bad and the input lag makes it feel bad to play due to having gotten used to things feeling very smooth.

The frames are paced evenly with extremely rare drops, unlike Star Wars Jedi Survivor. There's just no camera-based motion blur, so it might look choppy, especially on screens with fast MPRT.

This is basically the scourge of 30 fps gaming as a whole on OLEDs nowadays, unless they have good motion blur.

Hmm. Maybe it gets better in some areas like the pop in does but the first open world area, the grasslands I think was where I had quality mode on, it felt choppy and paced unevenly and definitely caused some ice slip on the camera controls. If it gets better past that area then I might have done myself a disservice, I suppose that's unfortunate but I'm well enough away from my TV to ignore that image quality at any rate.