It's an obvious thought, because it's obvious and if it's obvious then it's not original, but it was made in isolation: the association between temporal distance and particular mediums has to stop at some point. Sepia toned, or black & white or, washed out, colours connoting age are going to be orphaned connotations when nobody remembers why washed out tones or sepia are supposed to look old. Pixel art is a counterfactual argument and the teacup and 'saucer' shows that an orphaned concept can get along just fine by itself. Which really only leaves fashion and technology as true connotations for the age of media. Assuming at some point the recording medium 'peaks'*. Maybe a TV in the background with Rishi Sunak or local equivalent giving a speech about something important. Seems a bit lazy. Maybe at some point the past in film will be the past with somewhat different but similar shit. Probably more accurate that way.

* Not quite as dumb as it sounds given Nyquist-Shannon and 48KHz plus recording and the facts about human audio perception. Modern vinyl records come from digital masters so we can cosplay the past and because they can be mastered to sound better (in the digital domain - so they sound better in the analogue domain. There is an irony.)