If you look beyond visuals, which are bound to improve but never show themselves until at least a year into the gen, it's a huge advancement, yes. I suspect it's a combination of ignorance and impatience that's led to the more tepid reactions from so called hardcore on sites like this, but eventually we'll hit the point in the gen where everyone collectively goes "Ok THIS is next gen", and this time around it's going to be way more pronounced and impactful than the PS4/XB1 gen. These boxes are taking big, big steps towards balancing the overall specs, and opening up bottlenecks that have been a thorn in the side of devs for at least 10 years. If you're looking for a gargantuan 2D to 3D revolutionary jump, that won't happen again, not all at once. But the iterative steps we're seeing now are the kinds of moments that, in unison, will make you look back 15 years from now to see just how far the industry went, and why this upcoming gen in particular was so pivotal.
If you can't look beyond the visuals, what you've seen so far is a modest jump at the highest end of game development but nothing truly exciting. Unfortunately for these people the standardization of physically based rendering in the PS4/XB1 generation alongside incredible stylized artistry has brought us to a point where a lot of games, aesthetically, look "good enough." Shading is believable, scenes are dense and varied, facial capture at the highest tier of studios is really good now, eyes in videogames convey emotion better than ever before, cel shading techniques can look astounding. This is obviously not the peak, just look at where CG movies are, but a lot of people are still waiting for those instant mega leaps in visuals we used to get that simply won't happen anymore. What happens now is a huge leap in scene density and complexity as devs take advantage of modern CPUs and a new SSD baseline, while continuing to work out the kinks of realtime raytracing. In time, maybe not even next gen but the gen after, pathtracing, then more mature and further iterated on, alongside cutting edge animation tech will give us vital ingredients to hit true realtime photo realism and animation seamlessness, and we'll look back at 2020 games wondering how we ever thought they were good enough. But this will all take time. Games are walking now whereas before the industry was leaping in attempts to catch up to CG rendering, but these newer ideas are the most difficult ones to implement.
Or you could just sit out of games entirely and come back when full body and sensory VR immersion has been achieved. Realistically that's the next 2D to 3D jump.
