Especially with details like fur or hair. I'm used to older games having blocky and angular (more or less depending on when they were made) models with jagged edges due to aliasing with simple transparency effects used for stuff like hair.
Modern games just look less defined up close. Is it a bunch of post-processing effects? Does my monitor have especially chunky pixels?
I think the biggest contributor to what you said is that complicated effects like hair or clouds tend to be rendered over the course of multiple frames now. Instead of rendering the complete effect every frame, they render ~25% of the effect and then combine that with the previous couple of frames to get the final result.
I first heard about it when Horizon Zero Dawn used this technique in order to make realistic clouds: https://www.guerrilla-games.com/media/News/Files/The-Real-time-Volumetric-Cloudscapes-of-Horizon-Zero-Dawn.pdf
Like it said at page 93 of the document I linked, it decreases render time by a lot without needing to significantly change the underlying algorithm, and thus techniques like this are very attractive to (overworked game industry) graphics programmers in order to achieve their performance goals.
I think it looks pretty good for smooth things like clouds, but now it's used all over the place. And because it is only actually approximating the full image, it can lead to obvious loss of detail when used in the wrong places.
i think i noted in FF7: Remake, when i flicked the camera around i would sometimes see weird trailing artifacs from certain sources, i am now sure this was why (that and me managing to frustrate the built-in checks that are supposed to stop this from happening), huh, neat