games and art and graphics

I can give my thoughts on the terms. In general, it's like the word "depth" or even worse, the word "art". It is such a broad term with no set definition for people that is accepted by all groups, often leading to really weird debates. The general mass has no clue what art entails or why something is a famous piece of art, they are - for lack of a better term - a flock of hive minded npcs that just follow the mass. Everyone says Mona Lisa is famous? Welp time to go to the Louvre and check it out I guess and make a selfie with it.

So when the general audience makes a statement about visuals or art direction etc it is just letters connected to eachother with no meaning.

It also has no set standard in award-shows either. You can really easily seperated them in "technical achievement" and "artistic achievement", the former being more on the technical side i.e. where games like Crysis would've won at the time, or something like Kirby's Epic Yarn in the latter.

Epic Yarn is a good example of this just going wrong, as it won "best graphics" from Gametrailers in its year of release, beating out titles like GoW3, ME2, RDR, Heavy Rain and more. People were PISSED. Which is understandable since the term "graphics" is super broad so people had different expectations.

In terms of what is more impressive, i.e. a pixel art or a highpoly model - if you were to combine and compare the two, the end-result I'd say is the most important. We all remember the era where high-poly numbers were a thing to put on the boxart (like Star Wars Rogue Leader 2 kept doing in marketing), but it's just not sexy. Technological advancement is a given, artistic advancement is purely related to the expresion of the artists to be unique and or groundbreaking (at the time).

EDIT1: to add, I mean how the artist also comes together with the technological advancement, and uses it. Splinter Cell is a good example of this, using the new lightning technology to make a visually impressive game that mostly gets its style from real time shadows and darkness for example.

Frank Frazetta for example, set the standard for Fantasy art with his loose style and colors and hot babes, and now basically all fantasy art is filled with his style (making it generic). So there's always a push to make that new thing that breaks ground (for example Cellshading graphics, which was a unique artstyle, that then slowly became "ah, another cellshaded game").

Personally, I do have a greater appreciation of hand-drawn art, be it pixel or otherwise, that is hand-animated. A lot of games let physics do the animation for them in a lot of cases. There's a good example in this article where the animation of Chun-li from SF3 and SF4 is compared and it's a very, VERY interesting (and harsh) read:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/pixel-artist-renounces-pixel-art

Some of the images are sadly broken, but the text should suffice.

Should be pointed out that video-game reviewers, can't fully exist since there's so many elements to a game that they can never know about everything. You can have gameplay focused guys like me that might know a thing or two about art, but the best I can say about the music is "cool songs, especially that one", while others might be able to note more about the story and its pacing/structure, while less about the game's art and expression or technical side. It's why I find digital-foundry so interesting, since it focusses on an aspect of the game that I don't understand or comprehend.

Anyway, not sure if this is even REMOTELY close to what you wanted to read, but that's it! Cheers!