The thing about conflict is that it's a value neutral tool. You can have very low-stakes conflict "feel" really important. Most commercial romance books operate on really low-stakes conflict - like miscommunication - by grounding and connecting you with the character experiencing those emotions.
On the other hand, you can have very high-stakes conflict "feel" boring or irrelevant if the reader is not invested in your characters. Grimdark comics trying to emulate Watchmen are a good example: misery porn that missed the "point" of artistic depictions of pain, hurt, loss, grief, trauma.
Very clever authors will use your relationship to the characters to their advantage. The Iliad, for example, is known for its lengthy expository death scenes, and even my eyes glaze over when Random Soldier #5 dies. But when Patroclus dies and Achilles grieves, it hits you.
Homer takes that countable mass of removed death that you did not care about and grounds it in this one awful, avoidable, inevitable moment of loss and shows you that this is the cost of war: that *all* human loss is the loss of your best friend, your lover, that you will lose over and over again.
Homer then smacks you over the head with this: Achilles prosecutes the very grief that you would feel and it doesn't make him happy. The last scene of the book is Hector's funeral. The guy that killed YOUR best friend, and you have now learned that his death is the same death. It's a masterpiece.
This is a great point to make. Like, high-stakes jingoistic conflict holds literally no interest for me. Every time some character is like "they're going to kill the President," I either lose all interest or I immediately cheer for the villains. They act like I should intrinsically care about him.