Polycount budgest did not drastically increase to the point of you not needing normal maps. Not by a long shot. There a bit higher than last gen but nothing crazy. Look at The Order art dump and you will see that polycounts are still very similar to what last gen was.
My opinion as a hobbyist who spends too much time on Polycount: I don't feel like normal maps will be completely going away anytime soon, but there is a lot of things that you can just bevel and throw a detail normal map on and get just as good or better results than if you just baked a normal map. But there's also some…