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?
That's partly a design choice. I think it's because photorealism makes it that if you make important objects visually distinct or even glowing it breaks immersion in a sense when the norm is that there isn't a distinction between generic world objects and important ones. But as you said, now you need all these UI elements to point you where to go, which also breaks immersion.