I feel like this is very much a personal preference thing. They even called out Horizon Zero Dawn for looking very bad, and Zelda for looking very good.. while in my opinion the exact opposite is true.

I do see the point of the author: HZD goes for a "realistic", high-fidelity 3D fantasy world, yet the lighting makes no sense in physical terms. The contrast and brightness shown in the picture are all over the place, and can only be an artifact of visualising a world through a computer screen which has a very limited dynamic range - it is immersion-breaking. The Resident Evil 7 picture below looks much better. The video I linked in another comment explains why: in the physical world, the stronger the light, the more washed-out the colour will become. HZD is a saturated, high-contrast mess with too much compression in the low light, because of a bad colour mapper in their pipeline.

One can claim HZD's look is an "artistic choice" and that's inarguable, but the author believes it's simply not enough attention to the tone mapping process, which is a very complicated topic that's not usually taken seriously in game dev compared to film production.

The author is more pointing out that these games don't look realistic. Look at the foreground of the HZD shot - why is it almost black in daylight?

I think with enough exposure to the overdone contrast ratios, you start to get tired of it. It sacrifices a lot of clarity. I agree it does look good in some cases, for example I enjoy the look of Battlefield 1 a lot, but when playing it I often noticed I had issues seeing detail in darker areas.