I agree, I think most photorealistic art lost most of its appeal when color photography came out.

Maybe there's a brief moment of "I'm impressed with how much work you put into this" but for that to happen, you kind of have to see the work being done.

I think that's why impressionism has such staying power, impressionists realized that your brain doesn't need photorealism. They were panned by their contemporaries who were focused on photorealism, but time has proven they were onto something.

Even now the impressionist-style neural nets don't get it right.