You’re telling me! There were realtime reflections in Gamecube games! But back then overall lighting, rendering, and post processing weren’t so complex. Nowadays we have not just HD but 4K UHD in HDR, and 60f is the target. All in all even though graphics hardware has improved, so have our standards. And since most materials can get by without requiring POM, we have people messing with VR on mobile devices that need to hack and slash their shaders down to get reasonable performance. And once dynamic GI gets big, we’ll go through the motions once again.
POM will basically always be a high-end expensive that requires cutting down the rest of the game’s rendering to support. I just finished a 4K, 60f game for a client where tessellation actually performed better than POM!