Gotta say, that last version from blender, the one he hates, kinda seems to trigger some nostalgia for me. It's not as good looking as the drawn stuff, but it totally feels like something I would see in the late 80's or very early 90's in a game.
The Manhole is playable online at the Internet Archive:
https://images.gog-statics.com/69aba8baf69e17d7b5a528997efed...
But that's an even older style. For black-and-white Mac graphics, I do feel like the final blender output is closer to the old style than the final hand-drawn output, but mostly over one particular issue: every object in the blender image has an outline. A lot of the objects in the hand-drawn image don't; instead, they just bleed right into the empty space around them.
My gut tells me that the shadows of the plates and the pie in the dithered blender output are "too realistic" and should have been drawn differently.