Especially as reduced scope might torpedo the entire reason for the game to exist. A buggy game with a large scope may be orders of magnitude more successful than a well made small game.
What is necessary in a game is much less clear cut.
I feel like the trend towards minimalism in game design is a little misguided. When you're building a world for people to be immersed in little "unnecessary" features, or roadblocks, or redundancies in both setting and gameplay can make that world feel more real and engaging.
I think it depends, I for example hate "Extreme" realism, like for example in Kingdom Come: Deliverance picking flowers includes a lengthy animation, in Dragon Age Inquisition picking resources has the same flaw, first mods that appear attempt to speed the animation, or remove it... why do we need a grind simulator in this games, this would make sense in farming simulator maybe, as an option because it feels I am force to waste time doing repetitive things that are not enjoyable.
Crowdfunding is great when no VC will fund your track record. But it leads to even less incentive to produce a ROI. You can see evidence of this same pattern in the crypto ICO wave of 2017, where the business endgame was usually the raise, not the exit.
This does not seem to apply to AAA companies marketing, for some reason.