"You might like it, but many people don't."
Speak for yourself, not for many people. Personally, I like it when pixel art approaches realism. It's true art. Absolute Cinema
A simple example from this post: the original post has around 30 voteup, while the comment criticizing it has around 15–18 voteup. In another post where I explained my opinion in more detail, the amount of support and criticism was also fairly balanced. So I think it’s fair to say that many people don’t like this.
To be fair, every one of the example side by sides looks worse in the new format. They're all dark and have maybe 5% more detail the only thing that changed is more shadows "realistically" falling on the characters. Redoing everything is a lot of work, so I'm guessing the AI ness of it is to be expected. I've supported this project on Patreon previously, but I think I'm good dawg going forward.