The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming worse overall. In order to be taken seriously as "AAA" a developer feels like they cannot choose not to use the hardware to its fullest. Modern hardware means that we can have huge, open, living worlds, so every AAA game must have a huge, open, living world, enormously inflating development costs both in terms of scale and complexity. Likewise, modern hardware means that we can have beautiful, photorealistic graphics, so every AAA game must have beautiful, photorealistic graphics, massively inflating the budget due to hiring so many artists to make those assets, resulting in games that can't afford to take risks because of how much investment has been put into them. The temptation to do this has always existed, but now technology (and gamer expectations) has advanced far beyond the ability of game devs to scale.

> Perhaps we’ll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?

How about a different point of view: the 90s originated this problem. The advent of 3D hardware meant that every game had to be 3D. The shame is that with the prior generation (SNES et al) we were just mastering the art of 2D games, but suddenly all that gets chucked out the window (or nearly all, see Symphony Of The Night as the exception that proves the rule) in favor of crude, clunky, first-gen 3D adaptations. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that the advent of modern indie gaming would pick up the thread of 2D games, resulting in some of the best gaming experiences I've had. Maybe ten years from now AAA studios will at last feel free from the obligatory burden of pushing hardware to its limit and will content themselves with putting out games that are less technologically ambitious (and put some fraction of the saved effort towards something else, like storytelling or game mechanics).