In my (limited) experience a lot of it has to do with the amount of imagination the client has.
We have one client who can’t visualize anything without an ultra-photorealistic render of the thing, and we have another client who’s totally cool with hand motions, sound effects, and scribbles on paper. They have nearly identical products, but we have to use opposite approaches with them to get to the same end result. I prefer the one that can use scribbles on paper since it saves a ton of time: I can print out what we have so far, draw all over it, scan it in, then email it to him and get a quick response vs painstakingly CAD modeling and getting the lighting and materials just so and spending forever waiting for an HD render before I can get a response.