alt Hacker NewsDeus Ex:HR did the same thing, and did it in a much more original way. That game's black-and-gold color palette was objectively unusual for the cyberpunk genre -- where the conventional color sets were either black-and-green like an old terminal (or The Matrix), or the various shades of blue/pink/green/yellow/white neon lights. This is readily apparent if you browse cyberpunk tumblr, and the generic color sets map perfectly to CP2077's aesthetic.
The Deus Ex character designs, environment designs, and armor designs were also much less conventional.
I think that it's fair to call CP2077 aesthetically uninspired. It copied wholesale from the conventional and well-established aesthetic of the 2005-2015 period, without even changing anything. The end result is perfectly generic and looks like "art by committee" or "the path of least resistance."
The bright neon etc aesthetic is indeed a standard cyberpunk aesthetic, back since the 80s already. CP2077 is part of the cannon cyberpunk TT franchise, and they wanted to stay close to its aesthetic. It is not a brave choice, but it is a choice that targets familiarity of the audience that may be intimately or minimally aware of the 80s-90s cyberpunk retrofuturistic aesthetic. In this sense I do agree that it was "the path of least resistance", but I think it made sense. You cannot target both novelty and familiarity at the same time. It is not the case that the aesthetic is exhausted in computer games and it makes sense to target something new, in which case I would think that the criticism made more sense.