I don't play AAA games (and haven't played an ND game since Jak 3) so I don't have a horse in the Naughty Dog race, but Druckmann's take on "fun" was a valid one. A work of art can be engaging and emotionally impactful even if it isn't "fun", and sometimes evaluating a game based on whether testers are, in their own opinion, "having fun" is counterproductive. Is Papers, Please fun? Is Kentucky Route Zero? Is To The Moon? Hell, what would a tester say if you asked them if they were having fun after spending an hour with Disco Elysium?
Either way, you can hate the game and its plot, but to call TLOU2 shovelware is genuinely deranged. When's the last time you played an actual shovelware release?
Take a look at Haunted PS1, the games they published or that are in their compilations are usually close to that era of visuals.
For individual games you have stuff like, Anodyne 2, Cavern of Dreams, Zortch, Worlds, Lunistice, Hypnagogia, and many more. Like someone else said, there are plenty of indie games imitating or taking inspiration from the graphics of the late 90s and early 2000s.