My new $900+ monitor came in. Got it setup, and incredibly weird tearing began occurring, until the screen slowly became a smeared mess of colors and artifacts. Even in the menus of some games it looked like the refresh rate was way too low (flickering and such).
After trying everything to resolve the problem I finally decided to drive to Best Buy and get a new HDMI 2.1 cable. Yep, Asus just sent me a defective cable is all. Everything is fine now. Going to try and get their support to send me a new cable or reimburse me though.
As for the visuals, I went from:
27", 1440p, 75 Hz, no HDR
to:
32", 4K (3840x2160), 144 Hz, DisplayHDR 600
These games look almost entirely new. Older games like Star Wars: The Old Republic appear as if they gave the entire game a massive remaster or something. CoD: Vanguard looks like a movie at times - hell better than a movie in fact. I should have bought one of these years ago.