Do photons have a soul? On the surface level I kind of get the argument that headsets with camera passthrough are "artificial". The light that you see isn't the light that you're supposed to see, it's been captured by a photosensor, processed into data, projected and output on a display. Scary music cue, what a total dystopia. But if it gets to the point where you can't actually tell, does it matter?

Maybe it does to you, maybe a lot of people, but calling it degradation is still a subjective call.