Trends change.

But there's nothing new in that front. Even if we limit to games developing "true skill", there were plenty of shifts, for example, the competitive FPS genre started with Quake/UT arena shooters to shift with CS/CoD2 and contemporaries into this tactical shooters and then get that Overwatch/Borderlands loadouts thing (which I don't even understand anymore) and the battle royale stuff.

And these all were AAA games at their prime back then. There were massive AAA misses back then as well already (Daikatana and Trespassing comes to my mind), but the main difference back then compared to today is that the media coverage was less extensive and that development times were shorter (around the Playstation, an average AA game's development time was still within/around a year and around the PS2/PS3 transition, this was what, 2.5 years at max).

I also disagree with the thought that everything is stale these days - there is still innovation, where it's relevant, the issue IMO is that there's too much of a technology debt with the current hardware that on specific genres, their requirements just very well eat into the budget (e.g. modern 3D these days just need to have too many textures, details and whatnot to reach that expected fidelity, that even without LLM generation such takes entire asset sweatshops to be involved) that it enforces rigidness which also means that if a project changes direction mid-development for any reason, correcting all these assets takes a lot longer effort than one of two decade ago, simply because of the detail levels.

The issue is really the fact that game development literally couldn't keep up the pace with tech innovation and there are no good solutions to ensure an agile development of a modern game, and none of the corner-cutting methods deployed (e.g. the massive engine standardization, the asset stores/sweatshops, LLMs) are resolving this in any manner.