Increasing pixel count increases processing in all image gen im aware of.

I guess my question is more about why the tradeoff to higher resolutions is taken when resolution is clearly not a limiting factor for displaying something that looks real.

Aside from stylistic choices on look.

I think increasing fps does make something look more real. I wasn't really talking about "film look" related to 24 fps

There's a scale and on one end is the real world and the other is pong or something. I would put 640x480 camera captured images closer to real life than any game I've seen.

At a minimum, more processing sells more hardware