They were thinking the same thing every news organization, sports organization and TV network has been thinking for 30+ years: shiny draws the eye. There’s been a steady increase of graphics, sometimes informative, sometimes pointless, but always eye catching, for quite a long time. A lot of news shows now are living entirely on virtual sets, the desk is fake, the walls are fake, everything except the and maybe the clothes is CGI, and the chair might not actually look like that.
It turns out that clothes are particularly hard to model. The ways fabrics drape, fold and wrinkle are complex and poorly understood. Add to that the play of light on and through fabric and you have a very computationally intense problem.
Hair is even worse, to get real looking hair you have to model every single hair, make sure no two hairs overlap, each hair has it's own subtly different color, reflectivity and transparency, and it varies with angle and along the length of each strand. And the play of the light interacts between the hairs and changes with every motion.