Let me flip your question: have you ever seen a good looking PS1 game? I have, so what’s the problem with emulating it? Well, probably that nobody actually knows how.
I do agree with you that’s mostly used as an excuse. It’s very easy to plug in a PS1 shader, but that on its own isn’t going to do you magic or make your models good. Nor is it going to look anything like a PS1 game. Neither are the “next-gen minimum RTX” game engines helping.
Speaking of which, here’s mine: generic game engines were a mistake :).