When you're an artist who tries to recreate things from the past you learn very quickly the limitations of what we use nowadays. Tradeoffs in efficiency are often paid for with quality of life. For example many of the older high pressure sodium lamps were better for human eyesight because of their colour spectrum being a segment of daylight allowing better contrast perception and not straining the upper limits of the cones in your eyes for night vision. Their falloff was also much better, preventing harsh shadows inherent to fluorescent and LED lights that hide things all too easily and create unwelcoming chiseled depth on architecture. Sadly adding in those little quality of life benefits costs more fractions of a cent per unit, so the modern LED bulbs capable of recreating them go without.
The other thing, about the "McCentury Modern" architecture, has been proven time and again over the last decade. Flat shapes without detail with random splashes of colour cause anxiety because the human mind needs visual definition and coherency. There are ongoing studies about whether or not modern architecture causes depression because so many people have noticed. At least in the past the cheapest stuff used bricks for facades, but developers think even those are too expensive now. That and the proliferation of grey is entirely about money, because it's easier to sell the lowest common denominator without a hint of individuality. This is especially true when it comes to market instability, because when tenant turnover is in the range of months grabbing the cheapest thing and throwing together the least personable environment to rope in anybody at all will keep you from having a vacancy of longer than a few weeks.
The films thing is just... Nobody actually looks at physical examples anymore, so they have no idea how things should look. With practical effects you were manipulating and testing what already existed instead of trying to recreate it as an approximation. There's a surrealist level of detail in almost anything created via CG, only worsened by the lighting needing to be flattened to cover up the unfinished work done because of an impossible schedule and masked with digital colour correcting. Real waves don't have that much foam, real diamond weave cloth doesn't have that specular profile, real explosions don't have such low luminosity and so many particles, so on and so forth.
A lot of people realize things are very wrong with the world, they just don't have the expertise or the vocabulary to explain it. So they point at things they know other people will innately understand as examples. Don't say they hate change because of that limitation.