I rewatched the first one the other day and for the most part the visuals and CGI have held up over time, barely any "oh man this is bad CGI lmao" moments. Which somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this".
Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI.
As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
More recently, Andor is a good example with its mix of CGI and massive sets; The Mandalorian is a bad example with its over-reliance on the "Volume" LED stage.
But the visuals are The Hobbit's main selling point. People hate it because of the writing.
I agree with that, The Hobbit looked pretty bad. You're right that part of it was the bad writing, but I think it's a vicious circle -- if you're convinced that CGI can make twenty minutes of elf-vs-goblin parkour look cool, you'll write that into the script.
If instead you started from the viewpoint of, well, we made a successful movie trilogy out of a famous book trilogy; here's another famous and beloved book by the same author, who even went back and revised it to make it fit with the trilogy -- why don't we just use all the tools at our disposal to put that book on the big screen? Maybe that could have resulted in one really good movie.
For me, what grates are the action sequences that feel like they were written for the video game tie in -- the river escape sequence, for instance.
Well, the innovative scenes vary from the incredibly good highway chase to the boring and ridiculous fight between Neo and Agent Smith. Those movies were groundbreaking in "bad uses of CGI" too.
Here’s an example with nearly one kilocores: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...
Pre-CGI it looked like this: https://www.galaxus.de/im/Files/1/8/4/9/5/2/0/9/gollum_serki...