I don't think anyone would have complained if the art had been more detailed but in the same style as the original or even using real digitized actors.
Monkey Island II's art was slightly more comic-like than say The Last Crusade but still with realistic proportions and movements so that was the expectation before CoMI.
The art style changing to silly-comic is what got people riled up.
(Also a correction: by original I meant "Secret of" but mistyped "Curse of").
I meant Return to Monkey Island (2022), which was no more abrupt a change than say, "The Curse of Monkey Island" (1997).
Monkey Island was always "silly comic", it's its sine qua non.
People whined because they wanted a retro game, they wanted "the same style" (pixels) as the original "Secret", but Ron Gilbert was pretty explicit about this: "Secret" looked what it looked like due to limitations of the time, he wasn't "going for that style", it was just the style that they managed with pixel art. Monkey Island was a state-of-the-art game for its time.
So my example is fully within the terms of the concept we're describing: people growing attached to technical limitations, or in the original words:
> [...] examples of "fetishizing accidental properties of physical artworks that the original artists might have considered undesirable degradations"
Monkey Island II's art was slightly more comic-like than say The Last Crusade but still with realistic proportions and movements so that was the expectation before CoMI.
The art style changing to silly-comic is what got people riled up.