I also grew up with pixel art. What I do like about pixel art was that it forced you to use your imagination more to complete the scene. That has driven me towards modern games made entirely in ASCII or text, however, not towards more pixel art.
I highly recommend Brogue or Cogmind for people that want an example of a beautiful looking contemporary game made with ASCII/ANSI. The developer of Cogmind open-sourced his ASCII-art making tool![0]
It wasn’t until I started working on my own game that I realized just how important readability was for pixel & ascii games. Producing readable high resolution art, 3D or 2D, is actually extremely hard. I like ascii art a lot, but I’m not sure how much of that is a nostalgia issue for me and how much reflects what a new player would see.
It can be easier to set up a photorealistic level using PBR materials in Unreal now than to design a readable level from the ground up. I suspect more developers are going to use photo realism to mask larger problems in their games, and to some extent they already have.
I highly recommend Brogue or Cogmind for people that want an example of a beautiful looking contemporary game made with ASCII/ANSI. The developer of Cogmind open-sourced his ASCII-art making tool![0]
[0] - https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/