It's not an age thing. It's about graphical updates becoming an advancement with diminishing returns given we only have a limited visual acuity to begin with.

This is why engines have to work on smarter lighting effects, more realistic physics of water, hair, etc to step things up (or pivot to entirely new technology platforms like VR or AR). But the thing with more realistic physics is that they're not always really obvious. That's in part because there's a law of diminishing returns there too where previous generations of game engines would get progressively better at simulating these effects. So unless you're really looking out for the differences, a lot of the improvements will be easily overlooked (though I'm sure they're at least picked up at an unconscious level).

But when you go from monochrome to 4 colours. Or 4 to 16 colours to 256 or several million, that difference is very noticeable because the limitations were very noticeable too. And those were the changes that happened to gaming during the 80s and 90s.

> I literally couldn’t tell you a difference between the last two generations of PlayStation and Xbox

Exactly.

> but both consoles have their fan communities.

Of course they do. You'll find fan bases around most things. That doesn't prove anything other than humans being largely pack animals and habitual.