I think chasing photorealism also hurts the modding community, which hurts the players. No ordinary modding community could push out photorealistic contents in a realistic span of time. I think that's why we are seeing less and less mods nowadays comparing to the late 90s and early 2000s.

For FPS, HL2/Doom3 is probably the last generation that enjoys a huge modding community. Anything above it pushes ordinary modders away. I believe it is still quite possible to make mods for say UE4, but it just took such a long time that the projects never got finished.

In certain way, I so much wish the graphics froze by the year 2005.

HL2/Doom3 have built in mod support, so I don't think it's fair to compare it to games that don't have mod support.