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I'm not nearly as versed in the technical side as you, but my impression from reading this blog is that you're sort of both right? It's just that the 1980s were such a rapid time for PC tech development that it really depends on which particular year you look at. At the very start, in 1980, Sierra made a splash simply by having graphics at all, when there weren't a lot of computer games for sale on the Apple II, and the few that existed were either text adventures (still limited even in how much text they could have) or something like a port of breakout with very limited graphics. You could do better with arcade cabinets or video game consoles, of course, but those were specialized machines, not a general purpose PC. In that world, the graphics of [early Sierra]](https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/the-wizard-and-the-princess-part-1/) really stood out, and it took some skilled hacking from Ken Williams to make it work.
But then Sierra turned into a real company, with pressure to steadily release new games, so they stopped trying to push the edge in graphics and just churned out varients of more or less the same game, using their tried and true EGA-based engine that the made for the first King's Quest in 1984. Which looked nice enough when it first came out, but quickly aged, so their main claim was being easy enough to work with that non-hackers could make games, and they could sell to a wide audience.
But then at some point that formula stopped working, and they had to really double down again on graphics with their VGA games in the early 90s. Which weren't exactly a huge technical breakthough- the tech already existed to support it, and would have been even better on the Amiga- but they did a great job of just hiring skilled artists to make the pixel art look amazing, even if it wasn't super high tech. So then they got a new lease on life as a company making relatively simple, easy, family-friendly games which looked gorgeous but were also easy to run on less expensive computers.
Would you agree with that summary of the timeline?
A good summary (and de-escalation), thanks, and it does fit with a lot of what I recall (except for the family-friendly part - they released some mature games, too). Progress really was crazy for a time, with companies leapfrogging each other left and right. I guess what really started this argument was when I said that "Sierra was one of the companies pushing graphical standards in games, from EGA to VGA to FMV cutscenes", which I should probably walk back a bit, because @SkoomaDentist is technically correct that they weren't the first to release VGA or FMV adventure games. But they released some of the best-looking ones of these eras (some of the standouts I remember include KQ1, KQ4, SQ4, Willy Beamish, Gabriel Knight, KQ6, and Phantasmagoria). Their artists were anything but incompetent.
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