Eh, the way I see it, 1080 to 4K is a huge leap in image quality.
To me, even under constraint of hardware, effects still tend to look pretty excellent and portray otherworldly and stylized elements in a way that is completely satisfactory and sometimes awe-inspiring. Offering higher clarity of those effects at their current fidelity via increased resolution is a better overall net gain to the images being portrayed than to trying to allocate processing power to making particles look great. I think raytracing is the only technology I've been exposed to that looks like it has as profound an image quality boost by way of "effect" that matches that of increased resolution, and it's still early (and very expensive -- beyond accessibility to the console space right now) in the consumer market for wide adoption.
I think we have a perfectly fine balanced look as far as consoles go atm. PS4 Pro and Xbox One X might not always hit native 4K resolution, but I think seeing games like Resident Evil 2 get much closer to locking in a 60fps vs the base consoles is good, and then they also feature a pretty good reconstruction method for 4K output that to my eye undoubtedly improves image quality overall, and I'm perfectly satisfied with the quality of effects and lighting in that game. I know that's a single example and not all-inclusive of the entire picture, but I think developers tend to hit a similar mark more often than not utilizing the mid-generation refresh of consoles, and yes, 4K resolution output (even through reconstruction) often tends to be a goal because it's the most generalized means of achieving elevated image quality within constraints.
As far as varied content consumption goes, I think we're better for going after 4K -- a decision to buy a 4K TV didn't revolve solely around gaming for me, and I have really enjoyed consuming passive content like movies and streaming at a higher resolution with HDR. It's improved everything I consume, not just the games. 4K is worth it, then -- staying at 1080/1440p really only sees the benefit to gaming, and I think that's a good reason that PC gaming is kinda more focused there rather than console gaming... Because they usually are set up to have their own devoted monitor and space in most households.
My 4K TV is meant to provide the image quality boost to ALL content, videogames and passive forms of media, and I think PS4 Pro and Xbox One X in the console space honestly deserve a lot more credit for finding a really good balance for fitting into that home theater space in the here and now of market realities and hardware constraints.
I know gaming-specific advancements are available via PC right now, and that tech tends to scale well, but I don't think we're at a point where we can see consoles move forward with a big shift in focus on how their processing limitations are used to portray games until we can find more comprehensive trends that gaming console users are moving their console usage out of a mixed-media environment and demand for features like high refresh rate (120Hz+) and optimizing for low resolution for improved effects is actually preferred by console gamers.