I've been giving AOE4 a go due to the positive buzz (and game-pass), and as someone who's into the Company of Heroes style of tactical RTS I'm not really loving it. But never mind. What really surprised me was how bafflingly low detail the unit and building graphics were, particularly considering how zoomed in the game is. I had a look around in case something was up with my settings and noticed this:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-08-14-first-look-at-return-to-empire-the-china-only-age-of-empires-mobile-game

It obviously plays a little more phonerific, but the similarities in the graphics assets look nigh identical...

I think they wanted it to scale to a larger variety of systems, but i do agree it looks a bit simple, environment and atmospheric detail is nice, but the rest of it does look a bit dated.