I think the spirit of that motto lies more on the AAA side of things rather than indies. The idea of AAA executives squeezing people out of their souls to make every single pore of a character and every atom in existence of the game look ridiculous.... the motto says something like "yeah we don't really need that".
But the AAA is way different on the scale of details and polish they do. They are polish machines before anything else. There is the famous anecdote from the P.T. game that they have to make the assets look "way worse than they were" so it would feel more "indie", which is a bit insane if you look at the quality of those assets. Like I said AAA is such a different world.
But in the world we live in, for better or worse, graphics tend to be the first thing you see, especially if you want to sell.
It's not always the case, as an example, Undertale does not have the best graphics there, but it stuck because it had a previous fan-base from "obscure" rom hacking forums. Their charm was found somewhere else.
I don't know what to tell you, it hard. MY recommendation would be to try to aim for something unique about your game and stress a lot on that. Something like caves of Qud relies on the insanity of the possibilities of the rng, similar to what Dwarf Fortress does.
Also, you can buy cheap asset or find one with acceptable licenses. I know people like to call out asset flips... but more games than you know do use a lot of bought assets and people don't notice nor care because the elements are cohesive and good and make sense in your game (and yeah the game is mechanically good of course, people go for the graphics but stay for the gameplay).
You will take time curating though and finding a cohesive aesthetic though its not just buy a put in your game.
And my last idea is to get a cheap kit bashing tool. These use predefined lego pieces and you can form something relatively quick without too much effort.
For 3D I think of Kenney's asset forge
https://kenney.itch.io/assetforge
https://kenney.itch.io/assetforge-deluxe
And for 2d there is this nifty pixel sprite tool
https://blastmode.itch.io/pixelbasher
These all cost money though, maybe there are some free to use... itch io has some of these around.
Now these are probably not better than hiring someone, but it can give you a quick start and a potential foundation if/when you hire somebody to make the art
