I found a way to do this because I myself was prone to say that there was more degradation going on than there really was, it seems. This while still being amazed at how it looked during some of my flights. It was then difficult to say whether it was me overreacting (due to performance frustration or broken functionalities for example) or whether it really was that degraded as a lot of people would say.
Since I made the mistake of deleting my old screenshots, I had to find a way to find out, once and for all, and also as a meaning to pinpoint very precisely any particular problems should I found some (so no one could evade the problem).
Now there are still some things that may not be tested anymore and mislead our judgement: things that may happens entirely on Microsoft servers side. Maybe ground textures and their LOD could be restricted entirely during the streaming but I believe few if any of that is likely to be possible.
Truth is, I’m “afraid” that aside a litlle less tree range, a lot if you modded it, the game is even slightly better than on release (I’ll have to test water though, I think it used to be more impressive but then again that may just be me again lol). As a matter of fact, although you can’t see it much on my last 1.7.12.0 LOWI screenshot, you wouldn’t want that horrendous built-in sharpening filter from release to be back instead of the AMD FidelityFX they implemented later on. Makes the textures and overall scenery so much more blurry under a lot of circonstances (remember that for all the other shots, I deactivated built-in sharpen filter through UserCfg.opt for both version and used DELC_Sharpen through Reshade. If I did not do that, 1.14.6.0 would have win hands down in a lot of cases. But if you use the same sharpen filter, you’ll see the textures are in fact about the same resolution and uses the same LOD more or less.
In fact, MSFS works by streaming pretty low-res textures and artificially “upscale” their resolution by cleverly using sharpening filters. This is why you often see quite a lot of graininess in the ground textures, this is the side effect. Another side effect is that it can’t discriminate what to sharpen or not and thus affects everything on screen which is why some clouds, especially when they’re gray are equally sharpen thus producing grains on their edges or grayish areas. If you entirely remove sharpen filter and not use another one, the grains will be mostly gone on clouds (and they will look less defined though). This is one of the reason I use Reshade by the way, to have control over the sharpening filter on the fly controlling its intensity and to be able to turn it off when I’m flying IFR above overcast when there is no need for sharpening the ground anymore.
So to sums it up, turns out the game has been very slightly downgraded on trees it seems but is actually better than it used to be on release unmodded (slightly greater lod for buildings for example) even without taking the initial sharpening filter on release.
With that being said, if you want me to test some place in particular, or something (close up buildings details, or at what distance LODs are switched, or anything else) and compare with your MSFS, feel free to ask.