As much as I love Dark Souls it really did insane damage to the industry with people thinking they can just create this creative, deep universe and then litter the game with bread crumbs of it that barely relate to anything you are actually doing most of the time. Likely because all the cool shit happened aeons ago and you are basically a cleanup crew finishing it off.

Most of them probably know if you could see the full picture of their universe it would be easily picked apart as stupid or nonsensical, but it sort of "works" when you have a bunch of random pieces and then fill in the blank yourself (or a random youtuber does it for you).

At least the From games remembered to keep the gameplay the strongest suit (until Elden Ring) and you have games like Sekiro where this trend is reversed with insane gameplay covering milquetoast "every Japanese story ever told" cliches.