It’s a personal preference but I would take occasional smearing over janky frame rate, I don’t know why but if you are not a solid 60,90,120 it just feels really like there is a stutter every second or two even though it should be fine if it’s above 60fps.
For some games I’m happy to turn it on as it drops power/temps and provides virtually identical output (as far as i can tell anyway) to native, but my fans don’t need to go into overdrive mode.
I may even put on frame gen too if I just want to bump a stable-ish 80-90fps to stable 120fps, and again drops power and temps slightly. That sometimes does cause smearing but for the most part I don’t notice enough to be annoyed. Without them I would probably be running with more power draw and higher temps, and possibly still not even hitting lower resolutions at 120, some games as you say though can hit 120 no problem even without and the gpu won’t be stressed.
The challenges thst existed to use technology no longer exist, so there is no longer a reason to look under the hood for most people. It’s like how a lot of generations after boomers don’t know about how to change a tyre or spark plugs etc, cars got more reliable and industries created services to stop you needing to worry about that stuff.
As a kid I remember WANTING to play games with a friend on PC, he knew we needed a null modem cable and we went to pc shop 2 towns over got one and tried to figure out how to play together using it. Then when the Internet came out and we had to fight against Internet connection sharing so one computer could share Internet with friends pc. Trying to use no-cd patches just so we didn’t need to keep grabbing cds to play games etc.
There were so many things you learnt back then but it was because we had no alternative, I get why tech knowledge has vanished and I don’t blame them, they have had no need to solve the same problems and haven’t grown with technology, it’s been already established and they have had no need to concern themselves with it.
Problem is the working world still heavily needs PC skills and basic analytical ability so there needs to be more focus on those old “computer driving license” style courses so people can certify they know how to find a file and end task when something hangs.
In some games it’s super obvious that it’s doing upscaling and looks awful, some games with without upscaling look awful (TAA), it’s odd that in some cases tools like Dlss can look better than native TAA.
For the most part though it feels like the FLAC vs Opus or whatever, most people can’t notice difference and don’t care enough about it, but some people can tell the difference and want the best, I don’t think either are wrong it’s just down to how much you notice/can tolerate before it’s annoying.