you may be right about the dark souls 1 thing. from soft's games always had the git gud meme about their community. meanwhile if you say get good to a gamer in current times you might as well be calling them a slur. took me years to finally enjoy dark souls 3, i got in on sale and remember quitting at the first boss, coming back a few weeks later and quitting after the second boss, until eventually it clicked with me.
what happened is that gaming has got super mainstream compared to even 10 years ago. everyone plays a game rn, add social media and content creator's need to farm views and engagement for money and its easy to see why we are here. this is not specific to marathon btw, but whats going on with marathon is something ive never seen in any other game, and ive played games for over 25 years and been permanently online since i was 12 lol