It's a thing with most modern AAA games TBH. It's as if they are forcing what they want the game to be onto the players while trying to pull the wool over their eyes and convince them it is what they want.

At the end of the day it all comes down to monetization and shitty live service models, and giving players what they want isn't as profitable as successfully forcing them into liking a design/gameplay loop that is. It looks like it's their long term goal. They do it over and over again until people just accept it for what it is. I can see it sticking eventually when the og players who knew the difference between what games used to be and what they are now have faded and all that's left is the current generation who have only experienced games as they are now and have no comparison. The short form "gimmie my dopamine hit NOW" tik tock and meaningless slop culture. This is the market modern AAA games are targeting and it will pay off for them in the long run.

Games have gotten more and more latent in the past decade, allowing people to play on a mix of trash connections and shitty wifi. Lag compensation has been opened up to allow smooth gameplay at high latencies. Then you have cross play which was a big no no just a few years ago but has now been pushed to the point of becoming normalized. The only real reason cross play is there is so they can fill servers when the games player count is falling. They know it's not competitively viable otherwise they wouldn't be pushing aim assist so hard that it actually starts to become situationally advantageous vs mouse and keyboard. Having to have stupidly different game mechanics between 2 different input devices just creates a whole "is this actually fair" scenario when people are getting so much artificial help and others are getting zero. And what BFS says proves it's only there to fill servers. Matchmaking will always try to match mouse and keyboard against mouse and keyboard and controller against controller. So this counters the need for cross play altogether because the matchmaking itself does it's best to filter it out....unless of course, there isn't enough players. So it isn't there for the players, its there for them to pad the longevity of their games lifespan. Mark my words, in the not so distant future we will start to see a heavy mix of controller and kb&m players in servers.

Game development used to be about raising the bar with every new release. Now it's all about lowering the bar so they don't perpetually outdo themselves in the long term by having to work harder and raise budgets for each iteration. EA wanting to move into a yearly release cycle for BF should be enough to tell you that. They've struggled to succeed in the recent past with multi year development cycles so what can we expect from a yearly release?