That's totally cool. We're all entitled to like and value different things. The awesome thing with video games is that because there are so many of them, one can pick from a spectrum of realism. It's not an all-or-nothing problem.

There are a ton of people who value photorealism, and that's why resources are being put into it. And it's certainly not seen as "wastefulness" by those people. Personally, I would absolutely love to be able to put on a pair of VR goggles and be unable to tell if I'm viewing a real-time render, or a remote stereoscopic camera feed of a real scene. Yet, I don't think that fantastical physically-unrealistic rendering is a "wasteful" use of resources.