Games

Games used to have relatively cheaper budgets, so there was less interference by finance folks and corporate suits. That allowed the creative types to stretch more and try weirder shit. Now everything needs to be carefully min-maxed in an attempt to extract the absolute most amount of money, rather than some creative folks just wanting to make enough money to pay their bills and be able to make another game after their current one releases.

They also used to be made with far smaller teams, so there were less people to intervene when one member wanted to try something different.

Now, for non-indie games at least, each part of the game down to a fucking bush involves multiple peoples' work, so whether intentional or not, it's design by comitee before it even gets to the stuffed suits meddling.

Fucking greed at all costs ruins everything, and it will for as long as games aren't seen as an art form like cinema or music, where there are thriving subcultures of people making shit they want to make for the hell of it, whether an audience likes it or not.

Indie devs are making amazing inroads in that space, but I feel like every success story of indie games that makes it mainstream ends up making people expect AAA polish from small teams. It's possible, but the exception.

Hollow Knight is an outlier, and so many people seem to be unwilling to deal with the jank and rough edges that comes with the territory of small teams. There are so fucking many other indie metroidvanias that get disparagement for not having that level of polish, even though it's not reasonable to expect it all the time.

Slice of life farm sims that aren't Stardew (Eric Barone is gift to the world), colony/base building and management games that aren't Rimworld, survival crafting games that aren't Mincraft, etc. You get the point.