A year or so ago I solved an aspect of what's wrong with modern graphics, it's the absolute lack of specular changes, it's all uniformly set to 1, this is probably a large factor in the "washed out" look of certain assets in games despite being colorful, you can see in the above example with the door and bricks.

90% of modern visuals problems come from specular, it's so simple to see, your brain cuts out specular a lot of the time, so when you see fabrics with roughness 1 but they still look like they're "reflective" that's just stupid amounts of specular.

I've quit using uniform specular for anything hard in my scenes and it makes a huge difference, bricks don't reflect light in the same way that plastic does, I'm convinced this is the sole reason for the "washed out" look a ton of stuff in modern games have. Most specular you see in reality in human made environments is literally just Fresnel reflections.