I've noticed people assume things are CG that turn out to be practical effects, or 90% practical with just a bit of CG to add detail.
Worse, directors often lie about what’s practical and we’ll have replaced it with CG. So people online will cheer the “practicals” as being better visually, while not knowing what they’re even looking at.
I’ve seen interviews with actors even where they talk about how they look in a given shot or have done something, and not realize they’re not even really in the shot anymore.
People just have terrible eyes once you can convince them something is a certain way.
Lawrence of Arabia or Cleopatra alone have incredible fully live shot special effects which can not be easily replicated with CG and have aged like fine wine, unlike the trash early CG of the 80s and 90s which ruined otherwise great films like the last starfighter
You’re taking the best films of an era and comparing them to an arbitrary list of movies you don’t like? Adding to that, you’re comparing it to films in the infancy of a technology?
This is peak confusion of causality and correlation. There are tons of great films in that time frame with CG. Unless you’re going to argue that Jurassic Park is bad.