This article is just misinformed. Source: I’ve been working with color space conversion, HDR tone mapping, gamut mapping and “film look” for 20 years.
It’s clear from their critique of the first screenshots that their problem is not with HDR, but contrast levels. Contrast is a color grading decision totally separate from HDR tonemapping.
There’s then a digression about RED and Arri that is incorrect. Even their earliest cameras shot RAW and could be color matched against each other.
Then they assert that tone mapping is hampered by being a 1D curve, but this is more or less exactly how film works. AAA games often come up with their own curves rather than using stock curves like Hable or ACES, and I would assume that they’re often combined with 3D LUTs for “look” in order to reduce lookups.
The author is right about digital still cameras doing a very good job mapping the HDR sensor data to SDR images like JPEGs. The big camera companies have to balance “accuracy” and making the image “pleasing,” and that’s what photographers commonly call their “color science.” Really good gamut mapping is part of that secret sauce. However, part of what looks pleasing is that these are high contrast transforms, which is exactly what the author seems to not like.
They say “we don’t have the technical capability to run real film industry LUTs in the correct color spaces,” which is just factually incorrect. Color grading software and AAA games use the same GPUs and shader languages. A full ACES workflow would be overkill (not too heavy, just unnecessarily flexible) for a game, because you can do you full-on cinema color grading on your game and then bake it into a 3D LUT that very accurately captures the look.
The author then shows a screenshot of Breath of the Wild, which I’m nearly positive uses a global tonemap—it just might not do a lot of dynamic exposure adjustment.
Then they evaluate a few more images before praising a Forza image for being low contrast, which again, has nothing to do with HDR and everything to do with color grading.
Ultimately, the author is right that this is about aesthetics. Unfortunately, there’s no accounting for taste. But a game’s “look” is far more involved than just the use of HDR or tone mapping.