There are two parts to it.
First, it's a massive jump from the IO part of it. SSDs, hardware decompression blocks and more efficient compression. We have quickly got used to no loading times, and no long elevator rides.
We added Ray Tracing for the first time. Now while it's not at the same level as the top of the line Nvidia cards, it's something we have never had before, and the longer it goes on, the more devs will create hybrid solutions for it. Insomniac for example have done a great job with it.
The jump from the jaguar CPUs to the Zen 2 ones was also a big jump. It's doing alot of things in the background that we won't notice on the screen.
Secondly, while the GPUs are more than twice as powerful than the PS4 Pro and XOX, we are in the era of diminshing returns. For the average person to notice, they would need to have a split screen side by side, with a 400x zoom to notice the difference. My friend was playing his XSS and I actually couldn't believe it actually looked that good.
We just arnt going to notice the difference as much graphically from last gen to this gen. Red Dead Redemption on the XOX still looks stunning to this day, and most here in a blind test would not be able to say if it was last gen or this gen.
Having said that, one of the biggest additions is one that hasn't been utilised enough yet, and that is the various efficiency tools that MS and Sony have put into their consoles.
Mesh and Primitive Shaders can have a massive uptick in performance, yet fuck all devs have used them.
Sampler Feedback Streaming hasn't been used by anyone yet, and it can give massive improvements to RAM management.
What we need to for this generation to go long, with no mid gen Refresh. This would then force devs to utilise all the tools at their disposal to gain as much performance as they can. Far too many devs have just used the increase in rasterisation to make the improvements game after game. A few more polygons, a few higher quality textures, and away we go.