Doesn't mean I liked them, or that they wouldn't have been better as a 2D game. But IMHO the graphics stopped distracting from fun games... OTOH, I played plenty of games on the Atari 2600 were the player character wasn't much more than a chonky pixel :p
There has been some 2D decomps too, Pokemon Red/Blue being the biggest I can think of. I can also imagine they make more sense for the 3D consoles where games tended to be written in higher level languages than raw assembly.