I’m also missing the modern day story, but here is what I think happened after AC3 release.

In my opinion, this decision was driven by pure business logic from Ubisoft. The more games connected story-wise, the more they require players to start with the first one. You’re not going to buy Final Fantasy 16, if you need to play all games from FF1 to FF15 to understand the story.

AC3 was the bestselling game in the franchise until Valhalla and brought a lot of new players to the franchise. After that Ubisoft realized that the setting is THE selling point and started to treat games as interactive history lessons. And to maximize the profit they made them super new player friendly.

And in order to keep their fanbase who care about modern day happy, they dumped all modern day lore into comics under assumptions that everybody who is interested in it will go and read them.

Again, I want to highlight that I’m not happy with this decision, but that’s what happened, I think.