Do Kids Nowadays Care About Graphics?

Short answer with no evidence or even an anecdote: No.

Longer answer with anecdotal evidence:

My 11-year old son is currently playing 1997's Dungeon Keeper and 2000's Nox. I picked up both when Electronic Arts' Origin service had "on the house" games and ever since my Alienware's graphics card bit the dust 5 years ago these are the kinds of games that run best. Objectively, put against the current generation of graphics these two games are terrible to look at, Dungeon Keeper's first-person mode is particularly hard to look at. Everything is smeared, blocky, stretched even with the resolution jacked to 640x480:

Source: Moby Games

Nox fairs slightly better, but the graphics -- if I may drag out an old phrase and utter it once more -- are shit.

And really, when it comes right down to it, I'm not sure why this is even a question worth spending time on because young and old have been gobbling up Minecraft since it appeared in 2009. Minecraft continues to be (unfairly, probably) my touchstone for that moment in recent times when it became obvious that not only do kids not care about graphics, but most adults don't either.

In 2006 Gears of War launched and featured a "Eat shit and die!" level of in-your-face cover-based action that kind of blew my mind when I first saw it. Granted I grew up playing the likes of Donkey Kong and B.C.'s Quest for Tires and Sierra's rogue gallery of adventure games, so it wasn't going to take that much to blow my mind.

Kids don't care about graphics. They never did and they continue not to care. Even if the game looks terrible, they'll still give it a go. I guess it's childhood optimism that allows them to overlook the clunkiest of graphical fidelity and see past all those eye-popping polygons, voxels, and pixels.