All of these successes you named happened before the so called "indiepocalypse" and are the result of a decade of experience prior or from the project itself. This is survivorship bias. Success takes time, resilience, discipline, talent and a lot of luck but even then you'll still probably lose. Look, the vast majority of people fail to become marketable artists, musicians, writers, engineers.. why do you feel the need to claim that a task combining all of the above and more is "not that hard"? It's unrealistic. I encourage everyone that has the desire to do it and to support each other but never to lie to themselves and distort reality as a coping mechanism.. this path is a long road littered with the corpses of past failures. Most people don't find it fun (which is why they quit) and even those that do wouldn't dare to claim it's fun most of the time. Rewarding might be a better term but only if you can appreciate self growth more than materialistic rewards.. because even in success gatekeepers take a large cut of your usually small earnings, the audience loves you as much as they hate you while the rest of the world either doesn't get it or wants to use you. Dramatic? Yes lol. But am I wrong? No. This is how you present it. You still want to be a game dev after hearing that? Go for it you crazy mother fucker :D
I agree that the big studios devs bitching on Twitter are stupid. Not only do they flip assets from megascan and others but they also contract 3rd world studios to fill the holes left by their unskilled diversity hires. The managers are selling you high poly photorealism because it's a deceptively cheap art style and no one's left at the top with the talent to have a real artistic vision. A game like Elden Ring is magnitude harder to make than Spiderman 2. If that's what you meant in your OP then we're in agreement. Sorry my reply was with the assumption that you were taking a slap at all game devs including the ones still trying to make good products.
Sorry but this is a Dunning-Kruger type of post. It's good that you're making progress on your game and increasing your knowledge but you're falling in the trap of thinking that you can guess what the entire picture looks like just because you've seen a glimpse of its corner. Some things are relatively simple to code by themselves but inserting them in a giant machine full of many different parts made by many different people and then ensuring that everything plays well with each other... well that's never easy. That's the kind of thing you don't learn to overcome by reading theory but can only be acquired through experience. I'm referring to software here since that's the focus of your post but the other point is that art/music/design is magnitude harder to learn and can also only be acquired by grinding a lot. You always have to "just put the time in" but it's called difficult because the vast majority of people attempting it fail.
At the end of the day, it's easy to tape up a simple game, alone, with store assets and a pre-made engine but making a good high quality game that can compete with what's out there on budget/time is difficult... If it wasn't, everyone would do it.
Patient zero didn't lead to the epidemic. The centralisation of social media with the advent of Facebook/twitter and their feed based algorithm is what I'd consider the beginning of the end. Let me explain:
These platforms are setup to reward cheap emotionally reactive content. The sheer volume of shock posts also drowns out other subjects. So the result is that you got a population that's hooked up on the same system, seeing the same thing and these things are mostly reactionary bullshit. Who thrives in an environment like this? The loudest crybabies. Slowly, everyone gets "woken" up to their laments and call to actions are made. If you oppose said resolutions, you easily get publicly shamed because, after all, that itself is good content.
Meanwhile, businesses start using tools to analyze the platforms' data. There's never been a better way to sample public opinion at this scale in human history. Whether accurately or not, they start thinking that the trendier topics are what people care about and want. Again, the platform rewards shock so what comes on top are the laments of the crybabies and their call to action... So this leads businesses to adapt their strategy consequently. The statistics tell them that they should pander to cause XYZ and so they do.
Entertainment is the first industry to fall because their products live and die on trends more than they do out of their own artistic merit. They are the first to tune in to the feed and adapt to what they see there. What do they see? Cries of discrimination. What do they do? Adopt the "solutions" proposed by the loud ideologues.
And this my friend, is how it started.
To answer the post: as true as that might be (debatable tbh), realism is not a prerequisite for fun and decades of past success in entertainment have proven that having pretty girls is desirable. Also, by the way, no amount of makeup can fix these 2 trolls.