What
I can see this with film restoration like the WW1 footage where you're dealing with severely damaged originals, but most film images shot on 35mm look great. While film has grain it also has great resolution, and cinema lenses tend to be the state of the art in optics. AI is ideal for fixing things like hairs in the gate, judder, and other shutter-related problems. I think it has excellent potential for image restoration as well. But it's not yet good enough to handle texture and most integrators don't have a good idea of how to develop intra-frame continuity.
Proclaiming that a strictly bigger toolset is "[a]esthetically inferior" because directors are still learning how to use it is pure reflexive conservatism. There's no reason you have to show wrinkles just because you're shooting in 8k, it just becomes possible to do so while it was impossible before.
TV engineers started working on HDTV in the 70s. Sony demoed a HDTV video camera in 1981. HDTV made it's broadcast debut in the late 80s in Japan, under the name "Hi-Vision". First version of Rec. 709 was published in 1993.