I mean, I don't know what were the expectations people had, but seeing the complexity in the environments in Horizon 2, the Square Enix game and Demon's Souls (the intro is real time afaik), it was honestly really impressive to me, my jaw dropped when I saw those in 4K.
Of course, the increase in GPU is not as great as it was in the PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 generations, but that's a bit unrealistic now, since fabrication process improvements are much harder nowadays, but it was amazing what can be achieved with a ~2070 Super as a baseline plus that super fast SSD and much better CPU.