> The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.

As always, art benefits from limitations.

From the [dead] sibling

> Those old practical effects were incredibly labor intensive and took so long. The famous sequence where from the movie 2001 where he enters the monolith used slit-scan cameras and took up to 5 minutes per frame.

But those effects still hold up today, unlike most CGI from even decades later. So yes, like most modern "advancements" CGI lets you crank out imitations for cheaper but quality is lost. And the cost is itself a feature - it made directors really think about what effects are actually needed and which ones are just noise that don't benefit the film at all. And of course movie budgets on the whole haven't exactly been going down.