Yeah sadly AAA gaming has become a cesspool for multiple reasons.
1. Increased production cost and inflation but no one wants to pay more for a complete game so they have to throw in microtransactions which people also hate so we're watching these big studios collapse under their own weight now.
2. Censorship
You can play indie games which still have alt of pronoun riddle garbage but at least there's good titles
I enjoyed it quite a bit
I don't know. There are other things that have a severe performance impact that we could do away with. There are anti-aliasing algorithms that barely impact performance at all but we're still mostly using ones that kill performance, just as an example