They really think the industry is in the shitter and that studios are being closed and developers being laid off left and right because Gamers are boycotting video games that have too many female/gay/black characters or not enough booba and because video game studios don't employ enough white dudes. I know they're terminally stupid and wilfully ignorant but the way Microsoft's shitty hiring practices have affected Halo are well documented and they have nothing to do with developers having blue hair or pronouns on their bio
THEY WILL FIND OUT THE HARD WAY
lmao
it's weird seeing this because back in the 10s the consensus was that halo faded away because they kept reheating the same shit over and over. even as early as halo 4 you could see it, it just the same as halo reach but with a few "new" guns, reach itself being the same as halo 3 but with special abilities ("equipment"). i played a bit of infinite multiplayer way back when it came out and tbh it just felt like reach but like 10% faster.
The sentiment I more commonly saw among Halo fans was that Halo faded away because it lost its identity and started chasing trends, especially COD with its multiplayer.
COD's modern warfare era showed up and just completely stole Halo's place as THE console FPS, then Bungie moved on and left Microsoft aimlessly flailing around for almost 15 years now
It is very strange seeing these people nostalgic for muddy brown FPS slop and demanding all games be exactly the same, when that was probably the worst the gaming industry has ever been.
Halo bucked the trend by not being brown and gritty, it was incredibly colourful and kinda goofy and lighthearted at least until Reach which tried to be a more serious game about serious military people
Early Halo started before that trend though, the first few were bright and colourful, but were radically different from your Dooms and your Quakes which were the cornerstone of the FPS genre at the time. As the brown muddy slop FPS market got started afterwards, Halo also jumped onto that trend, and become generic brown muddy military slop, yeah, around Reach like you said.
Nawh it's because they abandoned core Halo game mechanics in favor of becoming a COD clone.
Slow, methodical gameplay became twitch-based and fast. They added sprinting into the game. They added weapon drops for kill streaks into the game, breaking all the careful map balance needed for the interesting asymetrical map types. They got rid of the Xbox Live queues that you let you pick specific game types (for a while you couldn't even queue up to just play Slayer).
343 just also didn't have the juice that Bungie did. The talent wasn't there. Halo was great because it felt great to play, it felt smooth and polished and exact in its movements, its balance, its weapons. 343 just couldn't keep up that level of polish, couldn't design interesting asymetrical maps, etc.
A major part also being that they heavily rely on short term contractors to save on costs. By the time they got properly schooled to work with their custom engine and worked on anything major they'd get rotated out with someone new who'd have to go through the whole ordeal again and have a completely different vision to the prior person.