My personal view on this that, since launch, there have been subtle changes to the graphics, but nothing material and life changing. I read a lot about graphical dumbing down or downgrades - pretty much none of which is accompanied by any evidence, screenshots or anythign else. I’ve been on a world tour since the sim launched, and have been documenting my travels here:
As a result, it turns out that I have a lot of screenshots going back to August and September last year. A couple of days ago, I did a little experiment and recreated some of the shots from back then to do a “then and now” comparison. You can see them here.
I should say that, other than turning motion blur off 
I’ve made no changes since launch to my graphical settings. I play on Ultra, with everything turned up - so 200 LOD on both sliders, 100 on render scaling, everything else maxed out. Motion blur and lens flare off.
It’s possible that Asobo are changing the scale on the sliders etc. They have talked about allowing them to extend beyond the current 200/Ultra for higher end PCs or for people wanting that quality and prepared to sacrifice FPS for it. Personally, I’ve not really seen that.