It's a shame that people who write video game shader code don't get recognized for their artistic merit. Imo it's an insanely expressive task to analyze and understand what it takes to produce a visual style, enough to formalize it with such precise math that it can be reproduced with any possible combination of geometry.

Like, lately I've seen a few people discuss the "samey" and lifeless visuals innate to x game engine (regardless of genre, style, or polygon count). So it's clear this impacts how people feel about a game. Obviously to say it's true for the whole of games in that engine is confirmation bias, because it's only ever mentioned when it's felt.

Some game devs and publishers just have a proclivity to use an engine's default shaders, because they look "good enough" with a few tweaks.