This thread made me think of how game development seems to have peaked or to have at best plateaued about 10-15 years ago depending on how you look at it. Look at how small teams of dedicated developers made some of the awesome games of the late 90s, early 2000s, and how sequels a few years later were better and better, until they stopped being better, they became in many ways worse. You could say that graphics got better, and in some ways that is true, but then you have to ask, what is the point of better graphics if you have less talented 3D artists (looking at those weird ass stare faces I've seen countless examples of in this thread here).
Stories have ceased to inspire, but become bland. UI clunky. We laugh at cut corners, such as ships with no "centre" being immune to enemy fire. The list goes on, and it's true for most games now (BG3 seems to have been an exception, though it has it's issues too).
We point to things such as diversity hires, outsourcing and such as the reason, yet that also only goes "so far". At some point there seems to have simple been made a decision - at least amongst a great many studios - to simply not really give a shit any more. They churn through a mix of god knows what, publish the junk, pay the gaming press to praise it, and hope enough people buy the product and don't bother to refund it to recoup the costs and maybe a bit more on the side. Creating a quality product that fans will love for decades seems to have left the industry, with the exception of a few small indy devs.
Or am I just old and jaded?