No, the timescale is "the 90s", the the specific example is from 1997, and chosen because of how badly it aged. Nobody looks at the original single-player Unreal graphics today and thinks "this is amazing!", but we all did at the time — Reflections! Dynamic lighting! It was amazing for the era — but it was also a long way from photorealism. ChatGPT is amazing… but how far is it from Brent Spiner's Data?

The era was people getting wowed from Wolfenstein (1992) to "about Halo or Half Life 2" (2001 or 2004).

And I'm not saying the flattening of excitement was for any specific reason, just that this was roughly when it stopped getting exciting — it might have been because the engines were good enough for 3D art styles beyond "as realistic as we can make it", but for all I know it was the War On Terror which changed the tone of press releases and how much the news in general cared. Or perhaps it was a culture shift which came with more people getting online and less media being printed on glossy paper and sold in newsagents.

Whatever the cause, it happened around that time.