I would say the sky and a private eye's dimly lit, smoke-filled 1920s office are pretty different, actually.
It's common for games to have an intentional designed aesthetic which uses cultural and social and graphical "languages" to create specific emotional impacts and effects. The lower the budget the more this is leaned into for expedient reasons but that in turn creates genre expectations! Low-poly and 8-bit are fine examples of what were once a product of technical limitations becoming their own target.
Subject matters also, and the overall aesthetic of the game; triple-A games often push towards what you're describing, that the most impactful and compelling may also be the most real...
...or at least, contain elements of it. Lots of games mess with color shading and saturation etc for the impact-reasons...
I do look forward to the era of more "photorealistic" rendering as you prefer, especially for natural landscapes like those I enjoy IRL. Some of which can have very "unnatural" feeling swings in tone and all sorts of things! I was just up in the mountains this week and saw a lot more variation in lighting and its impact on a consistent landscape (mountains across a lake) than I've ever seen in a game engine so far :)
And before games this was true of movies and before that photos and paintings. A master cinematographer can spend hours lighting a shot that will later be praised for its 'gritty realism' :-).
By extension, this means that it is highly desirable to have a renderer capable of reproducing the real world as a baseline for highly controllable aesthetic tweaks. When you look especially at VFX specific tools, they have - almost without exception - two layers of tools: the first creates a realistic simulation (e.g. water/fire/shattering...) and the second layer allows for tweaks to control the final look.
I think a Horizon Zero Dawn developer characterized their approach as “more realistic than reality” or something along those lines, i.e. they were aiming for the kind of perfect saturated look that you would only get in that golden hour with ideal surroundings but that we all recognize as real and at the same time don’t find too dull to stare at for hours. And I think for daytime HZD did do that quite well.
Likewise, Ansel Adams is particularly famous for popularizing manipulation of exposure, both in-camera snd during development.
Another problem with looking good is that it's a) subjective (since it has no real or objective reference point, really) and b) it quickly goes stale once something else looks "better". Just look at Doom. It looked good in 1993, everyone would agree on that. It's not realistic, never was realistic and will certainly never be realistic unless you take a particular cocktail of drugs, I guess.
I was excited when seeing things that are wonderfully realistic, but just as a sign of how far we have gone in computer graphics.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-colors-in...
Now suppose some aliens arrived at our planet and said: "Wow, your planet is the most-boring we've ever seen, it's all just one N2-colored ball." We'd be a little offended! Clearly, the dumb aliens are looking at it wrong!
Flip that in reverse, and we have an artistic obligation to choose "good colors" for planets that maximizes their interesting features. We already did it for surface-views on Earth.
If there's an alien living outside of the superconductor it probably has eyes that can sense all four components of the electroweak force, including the combination that we call electromagnetism, which is the only one that can pass through the weak force superconductor. Such a being would see the superconductor "material" as something like a block of red jello, only allowing one "color" to pass through and would be as surprised to see us there as we would be if we saw sentient beings inside a block of YBCu superconductor alloy.
Although we wouldn't have a way to see sentient beings inside a block of superconductor alloy, because we don't have any more long-range forces to probe it with, besides gravity. Our outside-weak alien could still see us with electromagnetism which is the one remaining long-range force we have, but that's disabled inside an electric superconductor too.
This is in contrast to the realism of "if you were there in person". If you step outside and look towards the sun and see lens-flares, consult an eye-doctor. If you see polyhedral lens-flares or bokeh... consult a roboticist.
The lens flare isn't telling you the sun literally makes polygonal shapes. It's telling you the sun is fucking bright and it's dazzling you, and it's doing that by reference to something we've seen in films shot with cameras.
You can achieve it other ways. HL2 Lost Coast - Valve's HDR tech demo - conveys the same basic fact by delaying the tonemap change. As you walk from the dark area to the bright area, the tonemap stays set for the dark area so your whole screen is washed out in white, until it gradually shifts to normal over about half a second. This is also how your pupils work, of course.
It's not just games. I just saw an episode of a TV show in which two people were sitting in a car, talking to each other.
Whichever one of them was speaking was in focus. The other one was dramatically blurred. This traded back and forth rapidly, because that's how conversations work. It was incredibly bizarre.
As a player, I'd rather compromise realistic rendering in order to be able to see the contours of things.
This is extremely untrue. It may be true that you spend most of your time in a dull-looking office or apartment, but most of reality -- at least here on Earth -- is quite visually interesting, and games are usually placed in visually interesting environments rather than set entirely within an office or apartment.
Beyond that, I would argue that the entire point of realism is not looking good (although it can look good), but rather immersion. The intent is to transport you to another world and make you feel like you're actually inside the scene. If your goal isn't to do that, then there's no need to bother with realism at all, and you can instead opt for highly stylized graphics that are intentionally designed to maximize aesthetically pleasing appearance and gameplay readability.