I think that's the most robust critical takeaway from this Hacker News thread. Vogel feels as if marginal spending on art assets is unprofitable, but if a root problem is instead artistic consistency then more expensive art is not necessarily (much) more effective art.
That said, this also doesn't negate Vogel's business point, that it's always worth examining what's "good enough" to optimize return. Suppose Vogel doesn't have and can't easily develop a good artistic eye for consistency; it's still probably not worth it to hire someone else to do it for him.
If you have an artist with decent technical skills, enough time, and an excellent art director, you can still achieve great results. Eventually that Artist will learn and become better in what they independently produce.
Plus, the art is visible through a camera, and with post-processing and FX - which are easily controlled or influenced by that same art director. Just tweaking colour, camera angle, and FOV can produce incredibly unique results.
I had a very small budget, and no team, and was able to produce something regarded as reasonably good-looking in 3D for Frontline Zed:
Vogel just isn't willing to put in time and money into visuals because it's probably a combination of it 1. not being a priority for him and 2. lacking the skill for visual design (not necessarily implementing it, but just having an eye for it) which is probably also due to the point #1