From what I understood is that these are supposedly bad because they look like video games instead of photographs. Not sure what the problem with that is though. I'm fine with video games looking like video games.

I also thought that, but then I scrolled down to the Breath of the Wild shot and got (part of) it: BotW has an awesomely rendered sky, whereas the CoD and to a lesser extent HZD ones have a desaturated, largely overexposed mess (despite all my affection for HZD). The Smaug shot is flawed in a similar manner.

And the photography comparison does come to mind immediately, because that kind of thing is in fact what you’ll get from a DSLR on a sunny day if you don’t know what you’re doing, and to some extent from a film camera too (I’m speaking about the sky only—the HZD shot has much too large a dynamic range to capture on a real camera without compositing). Photographers have a huge bags of tricks to deal with the problem, from taking photos in early morning light to darkening parts of a shot with a graduated ND filter to underexposing and fixing it up in post (before digital, that meant chemistry).

I think it is fair to hold games to this standard. It’s not that they have to look like photos. It’s that they shouldn’t have flaws in their look that have been recognized and solved for photos for more than a century.