I noticed it with Starfield. The game was obviously objectively shit, but there were still tons of people defending it online. Dig a little deeper and you quickly discover that most of them were just Xbox fanboys who were mindlessly shilling for their first big “next gen exclusive” over Sony.
Now I’m seeing the same thing with Astrobot. It is, by all indications, a solid platformer with very nice graphics. Look around the internet a bit and you find people calling it the best game of the generation, which is completely unhinged. But I guess that’s what happens when the console exclusives have been utter dogshit for almost an entire hardware cycle.
Seriously, this has been the worst condole generation of all time. They let the old systems anchor development like 3+ years too long, and what few big games they’ve developed for new hardware have been either woke trash or live service trash.
PC indie gaming is the only place to be.
Were they actually xbox fanboys or just Bethesda apologists? I remember seeing the same behavior in defense of Fallout 76 before Microsoft bought them. As far as I can tell, there aren't really console fanboys like there used to be. It is probably related to your second point, where there haven't been many exclusives to get that excited about.
As to it being the worst console generation, I would argue that is just a side effect of commies subverting the industry. AAA stuff is just as ass on PC, as are most of the indies. The entire industry is infected with cancer, and switching over to PC isn't enough to avoid it.
I would say there are more Bethesda apologists than XBOX fanboys in terms of defenders for this game, considering that beyond the pronoun shit people have pretty much noticed how badly the game sucks.
I do think that there is way too much garbage in the industry at this point to say that it will get better, and it will likely stay that way for a long time.