No, I don't focus on realism over the playability of the game. The last "photorealistic" game I played was Ready or Not. But I have recently been enjoying Vintage Story, The Legend of Dragoon, Koudelka, and other games with "bad" graphics. Aside from Vintage Story, it should be noted that these other games were considered "cutting edge" graphics for their time, but they are by no means photorealistic.

My issue is that TAA (among other things such as UE5s Nanite and Lumen tech when incorrectly used) typically ruins games it is used in, both from an image quality perspective and a performance perspective. I wish that developers would stop using the default or current implementations of TAA so that better, more performant algorithms that don't have the downside of smearing and has the upside of being faster can naturally emerge. Really, these are mostly problems that have already been solved but are ignored because big game studios operate via "Checkbox Development." Rather than spending the time and money to implement these better solutions, they instead just check the default box for the default effect because it is faster and costs them less money.

Ah yes, wanting better looking games that also perform better is a "crusade." Of course. How bigotted of me.

Different people also have different sensitivity to different types of artifacts. No doubt a degree of the complaints is overblown due to a big of tribal / mob mentality going on, but a few of the people complaining might just be more sensitive to it.

With TAA specifically there's probably also implementation differences going on, where someone has a bad experience with it once or twice and then generalizes that experience to all implementations of it.

M8, yer old, the kids have better acuity so they notice it. Maybe they are right on this one.