I mean, you take one look at Greek statues and Roman busts and you realize that people figured how to aim for realism, at least when it came to the human body and faces, over 2000 years ago.
Yet, unlike sculpture, paintings and drawings remained, uh, “immature” for centuries afterwards (to my limited knowledge, it was the Italian Renaissance that started making realistic paintings). Why?
Nuh-uh, people have been painting realistic pictures for wayy longer than that.
Here’s a Roman painting circa 40 BC.
This is from about 600-something AD.
12th or 13th century AD.
Also I think that possibly photograph-like realism may just not have been something artists aimed for, so they just created other styles that the next generation of artists learned to copy, and repeated that until someone came up with a new style.