I'll keep this (relatively, for me) short.
My kids and I have been playing Mario Kart World on the Switch 2. It's really well done, free roam is fun (but limited), and the controls, smoothness, graphics, etc. are REALLY well done. It's lacking in many features (ghosts racing, competitive free roam trials, tracks, items, etc.) and I hope many of the gaps will be filled in over the coming years. It's feeling a bit played out already.
BUT... I've also recently introduced Double Dash (Gamecube) and Mario Kart Wii to the kids. They got a kick out of wii motion controls and double dash's gimmicks, but even with a retrotink, playing it on a big flatscreen TV is just not ideal.
So I sailed the high seas for some ROMs (to games I already own), installed the Dolphin emulator, and installed some 4K texture packs. My PC is ok... i7-4790 processor (10+ years old) and a 3080.
Double Dash, a game from 23 years ago now looks almost as good as Mario Kart World (you can easily find Youtube videos). It's staggeringly good. The controls and speed -- better than World, imho. The performance is fantastic.
If you took the base Double Dash or Wii game and compared to World, you would say we've come incredibly far. But, with a little upscaling, some new textures, etc., it's clear that we really haven't.
I get that Nintendo games are not known for pushing the envelope, but I think this is just one good example of how ... empty ... modern AAA gaming is.
I played Burnout Revenge not too long ago. Upscaled, it looked amazing, and if you only improve the car models, it would look just fine nowadays.
On top of being more artistic, older games are also much easier to read. Most modern games are just throwing so many VFXs and polygons everywhere, it's impossible to see what's actually important, hence why they rely on yellow paint so much, for instance. Even when kids were playing games (sometimes they couldn't even really speak or read), they were still able to get around and find what to do.
Lack of improvements is one thing, but if you look at the overall picture, we've lost many things.
New PVP games don't come with bots anymore, when it was the case for the vast majority in the 90s / 2000s.
Community servers are gone. Now it's all matchmaking. No more bonding with the same people every night, statistically, you'll never find the same player twice in your life.
Basic features like Quick save / load are almost non-existent anymore.
Remember couch co-op? Barely any game has a splitscreen feature anymore, even though almost any game ever created is better in multiplayer than singleplayer. Even a terrible game is better, cause you at least make fun of the game with your friend and try to break it as much as you can.
Remember stuff that you unlocked simply by playing? As if, it's the devs giving you a gift because they're happy you enjoy the game and keep playing?
Play a few more games from the golden era, and you'll realise how much we've actually fallen.
The leading cause of poor readability in modern games is terrible image quality thanks to TAA. They've smeared Vaseline all over our videogames. Of course we can't see wtf is happening.