Do you have any examples in mind from each era? I thought Fallout 3 was quite good around back then. Today we've got stuff like Borderlands 4 (or whatever the newest one is) that barely run on anyone's PC, and general game install size has also shot up drastically so it's no longer really feasible to keep most of your games installed all the time and ready to play.

I mostly play indie/retro/slightly-old games these days, so I mostly hear of the negatives for modern AAA, admittedly. I'm also tempted to complain about live service, microtransactions, gacha, season passes, and so on in recent big releases, but maybe that would be getting off-topic.