Pixel art isn't just bucketing a higher resolution image into a lower resolution. If you're going to use that term, you should probably have at least a basic understanding of the medium.

Thanks for pointing that out. You're absolutely right. What I'm doing here is definitely not pixel art in the traditional sense, and I now realize the term may have been misleading. My apologies for that.

This. I wasn't expecting much, having tried similar claiming algorithms and been disappointing. But even among those, the example image used here looks barely better than downscale and posterize

Thanks for the honest feedback. Totally fair