This is true if we’re talking about the vanilla game (e.g., once you play 2K on PS5, you can’t go back to PS4), but the improvement is modest enough that modded old-gen still has new-gen beat pretty comfortably IMO. I can and did go back. To me the difference between vanilla old-gen and new-gen (e.g., going from PS4 to PS5) is closer to the difference between playing on Switch (old-gen, of course) to playing vanilla old-gen on a machine that can better handle the game (like PS4 or XB1). That’s a meaningful but modest leap, representing IMO less of an improvement to old-gen than you can achieve simply by applying mods, but to each their own. The real dream of course would be to have the best vanilla game, i.e., new-gen, and to make an even bigger leap by modding
that. I would bet that 2K24 is the final dual-gen title, so it’ll be interesting to see if 2K makes the series exclusive to new-gen consoles or if they bring it to PC as well. This is probably it for the Switch though.