Old games genuinely WERE better. The more basic graphics still allowed for beauty but crucially your imagination had to fill in the blanks. Modern games are too clean, too perfect, too obvious. It requires no mental effort on your part to discern the image. Even a simple indie game like Hollow Knight is 100x fancier looking than any 6th gen or below game, not better looking, but there's so much more going on in the frame. Games are simply too good looking now in that it's gone all the way back round to being boring to look at. The Shadow of the Colossus PS2 version vs the PS4 remaster is a great example of advancement being detrimental.
But it's not limited to visuals, level design has been forsaken in favour of big empty spaces. Gameplay suffered massively, where once there was abundant original and varied control schemes and game mechanics now everything slots into a neat little category with 1000 games exactly like it. But it was a slow change, so slow no one noticed until it was too late, and now no one remembers ever having anything better.
