This was true for last gen games maybe. Mostly because they are devoid of detail.
This gen, the detail is there. Especially in games like Starfield and Alan Wake 2. And what is happening now is that detail is lost in youtube compression and then further hidden in tiny gifs. Not to mention the HDR effect. You brought up the VHS filter, well the lack of HDR removes that filter from gifs because all the colors im seeing are gone as i have to capture the gifs in SDR.
I dont know how many times i take videos and as soon as im done converting them, im like wtf happened. New artifacts are added. The games no longer look crisp even though they are technically downscaled. And thats from 1GB video files recorded by GeForce now. Youtube gifs are a lost cause. Try it. Try making a gif and you will see it immediately.
Spiderman looks better on my tv than it does in Musilla's gifs. I told you not to play it in 1440p 40 fps. I tried it after finishing the campaign and it is too grainy, too soft and blurs out all the detail. Their Temporal injection technique is no substitute for DLSS 4k quality. It is worse than FSR2 which has a quality mode thats worse than dlss performance. you might as well be playing at 720p internal resolution there.
I dont think Musilla or anyone else for that matter would waste time recording gifs of poor looking areas. I saw your horizon screenshot the other day and spent several minutes trying to get my game to look like that before finally ending up in plainsong. Didnt bother taking a single screenshot of the bad area let alone record anything to prove you wrong. just not worth the time.
Luckily for us, Chiefdada did just that and while its not technically a gif, you can see that the game's flaws cant be hidden in gif form. You will see the pop-in, the fog, and the complete lack of detail and asset density that we see in musilla's gifs that show the game at its best.