Yeah, Goldeneye/Perfect Dark are pretty bad (though being a PlayStation kid, my primary experience was TimeSplitters, but they're all practically the same game), but that's more for the controls than the graphics. We kind of take FPS controls for granted these days (and when modern games like PUBG make crouch C instead of the Most Natural and Just CTRL, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth), but it was far from a solved problem 20 years ago.
But the RTS genre has literally not changed at all since AoE. The big question in my mind is: is AoE a universal truth, or are RTS developers lazy?