I think you're exactly right. This was already a problem with Genie 3, but they've appear to have gone all in on video generation over controllability.

The original Genie was a great piece of work with a real sense of purpose - to enable agents to learn about the real world in the way Dreamer or Schmidhuber's paper sketched. But now most of the people that drove that mission have left Deepmind (Jack Parker-Holder, Tim Rocktaschel, Demis) and it's become this instead.