I never thought I'd give credit to CD Projekt Red because they're the company that finally black pilled me permanently on modern releases. They do deserve credit though because even if their launch was a total shitshow by anyone's standard they have 'technically' been fixing the crashes and FPS issues plaguing the game and they don't have any major game breaking stuff in it that prevents you from even progressing the fucking story.
It really is atrocious and I am thinking of two titles in particular Baldur's Gate 3 and Rogue Trader. It's extremely annoying because even the negative reviews don't really talk about any of this which is why letting normies into gaming was a mistake. There are some game breaking bugs in these games that are either incredibly annoying to the point it made me not want to go near it anymore or they break the game and mean you can't even progress anymore.
Instead all it is retarded meme posting and people going "lulz gay sex and waifus take my updoots" and the only mention you can find on some of these bugs that are pretty significant is some obscure thread on steam or reddit that talks about it where it quietly gets stealth patched. The fuck are the programmers thinking? The only way they could possibly have allowed something that bad to get through is if they simply didn't give a shit, wrote the code and then declared it finished until the bug was found by gamers sometimes months later in release. It of course takes people awhile to pick up on these bugs depending on the size of the game and how far into the game it happened.
Play your own fucking games devs wtf, I have no respect for this.
You are suggesting that the dev playing helps them reinforce a certain playstyle that they are used and then only using that as a standard in order to iterate? In which case yes that is certainly a case that can happen, it is also something that even QA might get stuck into. But I do not agree that the devs playing their own game does nothing to help it. The very first iterations of a prototype would be something that the devs themself played in order to have any idea if the game is even feasible or fun. Later in the development process playing the game your self ensure that you can spot some obvious flaws (ofc with being human there will be blind spot which is why you bring in some other perspective to try new stuff)
Now with modern games being live service and such as your example were the iteration of endgame seems to be mostly in the balancing rather than trying more grand new features or other stuff or just removal of old stuff, I agree that the dev's own perspective starts being less useful.
Is this not more the standard folly of man when they believe themself to be expert and loses all their humility? In which case i'm not sure that the devs playing the game itself is the flaw rather than the ego, they could just be declaring themself anointed without playing.
Perhaps saying it does "nothing" was hasty. The better way to say my point was "no guarantee, and even risky to" finding issues or improving the game.