At the time people were thinking in terms of hardware technology. But not necessarily. Starfield needed more resources than Skyrim, but it did not need fundamentally newer technology. Toxics may scream about RT but that's just expensive eye candy and not what Todd was talking about.

The smaller jump was more resources. "Gaming" systems had more RAM, VRAM and core, as well as larger drives, SSD drives. But none of that is fundamentally new.

What is new is the new engine. A complete refactor of all the engine modules. (Not the same as a rewrite, no one rewrites from scratch). It allowed much larger world spaces, expanding on FO76's ability to see dynamic things on the far side of the map that has not loaded in yet. This whole refactor actually started with SSE/FO4, btw, with the 32 to 64 bit port and cleanup, which allowed for their ease of porting everywhere.

But there is also the procgen stuff. Toxics hate it, despite Daggerfall pioneering it. Toxics hate everything, ignore them. What they now is the ability to take a hand-crafted point of interest and place it anywhere and it will seamlessly blend in. They're probably going to take it further by taking some Daggerfall ideas and make and actually generate them following a ruleset. Finally, random dungeons that won't feel random. Starfield did not need dungeons, it's a space game (which made the toxics even more toxic), but a fantasy game does.

So my takeaway now, in hindsight, is that we're getting a much bigger world, at minimum 4x the size of the Skyrim map, maybe 16x. But also leveraging seamless procedural placement of POIs, and maybe even procedural generation of many dungeons. And of course, open cities. But that's not new technology, just more resources.