I'm sorry for being vague once more....
Don't be, your English wasn't the problem, I just wasn't sure what you meant by self-referential. You're more articulate than many native English speakers I know.
I feel that current advances in digital imagery are very self referential in the sense that they are only focusing on trying to improve previous goals in digital imagery. Hereby it seems that the creators are no longer trying to (re)produce reality but (re)produce digital reality.
I really don't think that is the goal of any VFX team. They're always trying to serve the project however they are needed to, and if that means recreating reality that is what they try to do.
Photorealism is often thought of as the holy-grail of CGI because of pure difficulty, but by definition it is often not the goal. Films like
Avatar fall more under the term hyperrealism. They show things that could not be captured with a camera, but follow the rules of reality to make it believable. So while something like this short film may be technically more "realistic" than the decidedly otherworldly CGI in
Avatar, both succeed in my eyes for making me believe in what they are showing me, but with very different artistic intents.