If Muslim artists weren't restricted from painting people and animals they wouldn't create the decorative motives they created. If early sound chips in personal computers weren't restricted chiptune genre wouldn't be created. And you can certainly make art using restrictions that aren't enforced on you - restrictions often inspire people and make it easier to create.
That being said while I love chip tunes and I like some old games made with pixel art I don't particulary like it in the new games, but that's just my opinion, lots of people have different preferences.
Also from gamedev POV pixel art allowed many modern indie games to be created which wouldn't be created otherwise. That's a plus in my book.
> Low quality collision objects?
Funny that you mentioned this - some collision detection bugs in starcraft 2 were introduced on purpose to mimic bugs in starcraft 1 because these bugs increased the skill cap (people learnt to abuse them to get ahead of their opponents and community liked that because it was another thing you had to learn to master the game). See "mineral walk" :)
chiptunes are also a stylistic choice some games make over full hi def sounds and music.
Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone).
Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys).
The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...
Just because something has more impressive metrics doesn't make it fun.
For example, just because the technology exists to make a virtually unlimited range of sounds and effects doesn't mean that we should abolish simple acoustic music... some people like that style, which originally existed because that's all the technology that was available.
E.g. black and white photography is often used to emphasise composition and lighting more. Specific palettes. Specific sets of instruments - a classical composition will not usually be for "some random number and set of musicians" but written for or arranged for, say, a quartet or a symphony orchestra. Both visual art and music tends to follow a whole range of rules to match certain styles.
And yes, reducing size is also a choice - the demo scene takes that very seriously for a good reason: it again forces a different focus. A non-size constrained demo category emphasizes cooperation and teams working on different parts, and project management and is a totally different thing than, say, a 4K demo where you have to focus on reducing a single concept to its essence.
A direct size constraint may not be that important for most games (though for some it is: people still develop cartridge games for the Commodore 64 for example), but resolution and palette constraints do act as implicit size constraints too to a great extent.
Well done pixel art is just a form of minimalism in art that focuses on shading and composition and exploiting patterns and how we interpret pictures. Just reducing resolution of a picture almost always produces bad pixel art. E.g. r/pixelart on Reddit includes this rule:
Art must be comprised mostly of pixel art using pixel-level manipulation.
Color reductions, index painting, computer generated, oekaki, aliased
digital painting etc. are not permitted unless they have been cleaned up
by hand afterwards or were posted with the [WIP] tag.
Similarly reduced palettes forces much more conscious thinking about composition to make it make sense.
Modern pixel art, like modern chip tunes of course have different motivations from "authentic" art made because the constraints were real constraints of the hardware, but it's really no different from people who e.g. choose to compose for piano even though they could compose for a synth and be free to include sounds no piano can reproduce. We have not entirely abandoned piano music just because we now have more flexible instruments available.