I think pixel art by itself is rad and has an audience that appreciates it. For games though, even beyond the problem of the audience not getting the point, in the age of retina displays there are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want.

If one was so inclined to stick with blocky pixel art, one could always render the bitmaps' pixels as filled vector rectangles and the target display would autoscale those rectangles without blurring them (unless they became subpixel-sized.)

But, I personally think a high resolution pixel art style in games is just going to confuse the consumer. Box shots no longer sell a game, trailer videos do. Are you going for high detail but low color count and 24fps animation? That does seem like a strange choice when I write it like that.

Low resolution pixel art (320 pixels wide or tall) makes a statement, and I think the consumers get the "retro" style the developer is going for there. But then why would an artist with a pencil and a budget ever want to restrict themselves like that?

I don't know what Ubisoft did in recent Rayman titles, but it looks like 3D or 2D vector art. The animations are super fluid, scale very nicely, and are super fun to watch! I suppose as the author suggests at the end, hand-placed curves could be a good substitute for hand-placed blocks.