Most people I know who game don't care about framerate, resolution, and all that good stuff. I can't imagine sinking in nearly 1000 hours on a game locked at 30fps at a weird downscaled resolution when I can play the game at unlocked fps at native resolution.
I have the same issue with Gears of War 4 though for PC. TAA is globally enabled to enhance performance. Just a nice smear of vaseline to increase performance.
My post probably came off lacking some details, but this is basically what I mean. I get the image quality is subjective, but I see more "gamers" quick to through native resolution out the window for quasi-4K that introduces a myriad of distortion such as blurriness, rendering issues, and etc.
There were always people like that. Some just doesn't care about visual quality. It's like for them good visual quality is not required to enjoy the game. I know people like that.
Oh yeah, that's always been a given. I guess more so now we got our GPU vendors pushing for this stuff that makes it weird. Historically they've pushed for higher frame rates and higher resolutions. Now we see NV dipping it's toes into upscaling. Someone had some great comparison shots (granted still images so you got that) of basically...wait let me just link them.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nvidia-dlss-test-in-battlefield-v.252545/#post-3994023
And to me, I'd take the 75% Resolution with TAA over DLSS in this particular situation, but ultimately I'd just settle with native+TAA if I could swing it.
I don't get that feeling at all, and it's based on the same discussion you had with your nephew: he cares about FPS - about how the environment feels in motion - not whether he can stop and enjoy rose petal reflections into puddles.
If that were true he wouldn't load up mods that essentially cripple his frame rate. He asked me why I cared since I'm the one thats "I just bought a new video card, my rates improved" so he thinks i only care about frame rate. When I showed him my settings, he asked why mine look so sharp, I said I don't use SMAA or TAA, I usa SSAA whenever I can, which is why I often talk about the GPU performance, ie frame rates. He games at like <30 FPS because he uses texture modes that basically destroy his VRAM. I've tried to explain it, but "it runs better than my Xbox" well of course it does, but still...oh well. Let them be.
EDIT: I also setup their PC for TV gaming. So they run at 1080p@60. So their GPU requirements aren't as high. When they come over I switch over to the living room TV which is also 1080p@60, so I got tons of processing power to slather some SSAA in the games they'd most likely want to play (minecraft for the younger ones, and COD for the older ones).