PBR isn’t shit, and it doesn’t necessarily mean targeting photorealism.

It’s just a benchmark for material rendering that means once all your assets come out the other end of production, they work consistently with each other.

You could shift that benchmark towards cartoony or painterly or whatever you like, and even with assets produced using PBR, it’s easier to “style” your game later because all your different assets are at the same starting point, and will therefore react to rendering changes consistently across the board.

Basically if your entire team is making metal materials by eyeballing it, and you then put it all together in a scene, you won’t be able to get all the different metal objects to look like metal at the same time as you make changes to the lighting in the scene, because the asset team made all of them using slightly different material parameters.

If you make your entire asset production pipeline PBR, all metal assets will behave the same, all glass materials will behave the same, flesh, fabric, fur…

You get the idea.