I’ll admit I lost the plot a long time ago, but there’s a part of me that wonders if the main purpose behind the game engine and graphics card treadmill is to line the pockets of people who sell games engines and graphics cards. My subjective sense of the connection between technology and enjoyment as a player started to degrade about a decade back.

I think it was just studios competing with each other in the 2010s to see who could make the biggest most ambitious game worlds. Leading to ballooning dev costs and then a feedback loop of higher production costs leading to safer design decisions.

There was also a heavy emphasis on games being "cinematic" which necessitates photorealistic rendering.

AAA games have been pretty artless for a while now baring a couple exceptions.

I'd it's more a convenient outcome of maximizing profits than premeditated. Not optimizing is cheaper for studios while Nvidia doesn't mind extra popularity for their DLSS feature.

Crysis 3 is over a decade old, still looks great and ran on hardware that wouldn't suffice for web browsing today. I haven't seen anything in games since then that justified a significant increase in system requirements.