Yeah this is all completely fair and I agree with all of it. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the "AI" you can't really unsee it.

But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I knew it'd get a lot of (valid) pushback...

As with all things art, labels are really difficult and the context / meaning / technique is at once completely tied to genre but also completely irrelevant. Think about the label "techno" - the label is deeply meaningful and subtle to some and almost meaningless to others