You'll always have some level of freedom in your interpretation, no matter what workflow you're using on your assets.
UC4 has hand sculpted faces, scanned clothes, hand sculpted rocks, and who knows how many other different approaches in all the various assets.
Battlefront has scanned rocks and other terrain elements from real life, scanned maquettes and costumes and props for character elements, hand sculpted hero character heads, and again whatever else they've relied on.
We did work on The Taken King, so I'm not really free to talk about details; but it should be obvious that a lot of the artwork is handmade, too.
It still doesn't change my point that there's a line you can draw in your art direction, where you can either commit to realism everywhere, or keep things stylized.
Scanning will not inevitably lead to full realism, because you can still do anything with the assets; but it will certainly force your hand when you build an entire pipeline to automatically process the source data into game ready assets. I think it's mostly safe to say that ND's scanned cloth assets are still heavily modified by hand - in their case, it's just one of the many tools their artists use for a certain end. On the other hand, DICE has used their scans from the Lucasarts archives as 1:1 references as well, and they've aimed to recreate them as precisely as possible in their game assets. Noone would want to see some unique artistic impression of a stormtrooper in a SW game, after all, right?
Another good example would be Quantum Break. They obviously did a lot of scanning for the characters, but they weren't only using the data as reference or as a starting point - they wanted a CG version of the talent as close to real life as possible, and whatever manual work was involved, it was also driven by the same goals. Jack Joyce is not someone based on Shawn Ashmore, it's meant to be the actor himself.
Rocks are obviously different in many ways... but in the case of Battlefront, DICE wanted the rocks they've seen in Iceland to appear in their game; whereas Naught Dog wanted rocks that looked pretty right next to their Drake who wasn't a digital replica of anyone.
I hope this makes some sort of sense.