The aliasing is terrible, but I am not entirely clear on how people never noticed it pre-Odyssey, because to my eyes it was just as bad then - it is a long standing complaint.
I guess a few things I could guess at would be:
* Aside from everything else in the game, the planet terrain geometry and texturing was "smoother" in nature, and used more diffuse materials, which inherently quantifies less into obvious jaggies; A blurry texture "self-anti-aliases", so to speak, in a way that something with sharp edges does not - the classical example of the latter is the old red-brick-and-white-mortar wall-with-single-pixel-wide-seams. Whilst totally lacking the skill to check, I'm even inclined to (wildly) speculate that maybe Horizons planets were even rendered on a separate "forward" render path (...with which can use multisampling type antialiasing) of its own back then, but now brought in like with the rest of the game, which uses deferred rendering (...with which MSAA is less of an option) . (It is also possible that they had a higher quality sampling/interpolation algorithm for the previous terrain bitmaps which were held in arrays of discrete presumably floating point elevation values, than the new bitmap based ones -- as some point one have to begin to skip values taken from a source, or an inordinate amount of work will be spent on calculating every single one.)
* Given the addition of of-foot gameplay, we find ourselves looking at more man-made structures, for longer periods of time, than we did previously, and we see them from a much lower elevation vantage point, which is just about always level with the ground, and as such othogonal with the typically level and right angles architecture, and moving at much lower relative velocity. On a monitor with pixels in a grid layout, horizontal and vertical lines will always break up in a more obvious manner than others. Those railings always broke up into stair-stepping an non-contiguous lines, but we never hung around them for long enough, nor paid enough attention to them, to be as annoyed with them as now, when they are closer range, and you are negotiating the environment they are part of, rather than essentially background to the station menus.
* Finer detail is necessary, for things to not look boxy and lowres up close - this is mostly handled by LODs and Mipmaps, though...
* Specular aliasing (separate in nature to geometry edge aliasing) was always terrible, but new materials may possible be even more shiny that previously... I recall during the Kickstarter somebody asked whether ED would be using PBR (Physically Based Rendering -- a unified set of material properties and how to render them), and the answer was "yes", so I am not convinced Odyssey necessarily added it - it may already have been there, but materials definitely come out differently in Odyssey in many ways, so either they were reworked, or the way they are rendered. -Maybe I could tie this back to the first section about the planet materials - maybe those were not PBR, I don't know...
Personally I will always prefer suffering a bit of aliasing, over suffering blurry graphics, no matter how much I dislike said aliasing.
I'm desperately hoping that if FDev are implementing FSR 2 (I am assuming most developers will have had pre-releases, by the way - not just Arcane, who already has in Deathloop), they will do it using high enough LODs, that the camera jittering can give us as detailed output as possible, and not just the less detail of the lower LOD bias normally associated with the lower spatial resolution that is rendered for subsequent upscaling. Everything in the game comes out with a much better sense of scale, when it exhibits the detail of something 1:1, as compared with a lumpy-paint scale model. :7
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