Bespoke pixel art is an unbelievable amount of work. I always like the example of Dead Cells where the art guy had too much work to do by hand so he went with low-poly models run through a pixelization filter and exported to a prerendered sprite sheet. Much, much faster than working by hand, and it also allowed him to do things like easily adjust animation timing and minor movements without needing a whole new sprite or a weird visible pause in the sprite animation. It's like the opposite of Donkey Kong Country, which did prerendered sprites for the high amount of detail at the time, he did it because it's so much less work these days.