The Graphics update was unnecessary

[Gyson]

Are your settings in the launcher the same as your in-game settings, especially the gamma? It looks like the gamma is way off in the second screenshot (look at the background for obvious differences).

The settings are the same. However, the character illumination setting for Dawntrail's Benchmark can't be altered and (I believe) it has the character lighting maxed at 100. In the real game I leave this at 0 because my character is not radioactive, so why would he need to self-illuminate.

But I raised the character lighting to 100 temporarily to take another photo for a more accurate comparison, and to me the new Dawntrail version (right) does not look the same/better than the old version (left).

Edit: You were correct about the gamma, it was set to 50 in the Dawntrail Benchmark. I lowered it down to the same value I use in Endwalker and updated the image.

Are people actually trying to argue that this looks good?

The image you posted clearly looks bad, but I think the more important question is "how does it look after the update?", because if the answer is "different, but still bad", then I can understand people questioning whether the update was worth it or not.