The biggest difference is she doesn't want to fuck around with environments.
I've enjoyed some games that did a mixed style where the majority of the game is characters in front of static images (be they stylized photos or renders for locations that keep getting reused) but they would still have full on rendered scenes for important sequences i.e. sexy time or big story beats as opposed to "MC goes to work at the office, he stands in front of a .png"
Games like
Light of my Life and
Healslut make pretty good use of this "character sprites in front of a static image" system for the dialogue scenes, which obviously saves a lot of time and effort, but they still do full renders for "action" scenes.
But if your artist doesn't want to do environments
at all I don't think that's acceptable. Removing and remaking all the existing good art on top of it is a waste of time and frankly kind of taking a butcher's knife to the game's legacy. Also not really a fan of the "so blurred, it looks like you're having a stroke" style in the first place. I'd personally take real renders and no animations over the opposite any day.
Look, this is one of my absolute favorite games and I'd love to see where you'd take it next, even with a somewhat downgraded graphic style, but this is too many compromises. I always thought your writing was the most important part of the game, but the great renders and music choices really put it over the top and made it a full experience.
I'd rather wait another year for a real update than have some cheap knockoff version.