I think people have forgotten what a games used to be (PS1 and before)... a self-consistent system of interactions with a challenge attached to it. That challenge is meant to stump the player, and that was a huge part of the appeal, to be good at something difficult and overcome/triumph over the challenge issued by the game developers.

After mobile games became huge, the laziness of gamers has been increasingly catered to with fancy UI, quest tracking, dying with little consequence, etc. Elden Ring is doing something refreshing and apparently surprising to other game devs: it just simply leaves the player alone to solve a challenge.