Massive improvement.

A product of its time. A lot of franchises were going for the militaristic, grounded in reality aesthetic during the mid-late 2000's, due to how war-focused we were (post 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan). Movies, Video Games, Toys….the MCU's decade-long success story started off because of it, considering it basically defines everything about Iron Man 1.

To his credit though, this does help make the Decepticons in the early films feel truly monstrous. The intro scene where Blackout manages to thoroughly eradicate a military base just holds so much weight in establishing how powerful one Transformer is on their own. That can mostly be contributed to just how threateningly inhuman he is in his design (sharp insect-like face, gigantic lumbering frame covered in guns, colorless mechanical palette, dead silence the entire time he's vaporizing everything).