Opinions can wildly vary on this but for me it depends entirely on your priorities and what you're designing for your game. Are you designing a game that features a lot of sea and water? If so, you could get away with throwing quite a lot of polygons at the problem because you want it to look impressive if that's the focus of the game. What you don't want to do is be wasteful. You don't want to for example throw 90,000 tris at one character because that would just be ridiculous.
At the same time though again, depends on priorities, every gamer is different, but I'm somebody who looks at a 'high poly' 'AAA' title and I think it's immediately going to be garbage because they're inevitably going to be using some kind of third party assets for their generation and they'll just be churning out one title after another using generated human models. They're getting more and more blatant about that now with the release of Unreal 5. These days I'm much more impressed by hand crafted stuff even if it's low poly.
There's also the magic of using shaders and well done textures to consider, procedural textures in particular I find produce very good results but can compliment art well with enough tweaking, these save a ton on performance but still look nice. It's not exactly the best answer in the world I can give, but the fact is it just depends entirely on the results you want. In terms of performance, lower poly is always best, but really if it looks good and runs well regardless on most machines people aren't going to notice much either way.
