Possible, surely. Gamers are pretty well informed these days though. And the original game looks beautiful already.
The people who would care about the graphical difference would know enough to know how stupid this is right?
I don’t think so, a lot of people just want “the best” and don’t need to actually have quantifiable reasons why it’s “the best.” Spending $50 or whatever to get “the best” isn’t really a concern when you’re mostly looking to max out your $10k gaming PC.
Whether there are enough of those to cover the development costs here is another question, but since they eliminated the alternative, even those who are “smart enough” don’t have a realistic alternative.