There are hundreds of indie studios out there that find funding just fine. Even indie studios making eclectic puzzle games with weird stories. So this is probably not the reason.
Indie devs have the time and freedom to pursue any new ideas, and it seems like every couple of months a new indie game goes viral on Steam. But many of them are passion projects that were done in someone's spare time outside of their day job. If devs could give investors more confidence that a game will sell well or go viral if it hits a certain development stage, we could do a better job of directing game dev funding towards indie devs making truly fun games.
I know a guy who works with one of those publishers.
According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.
Now, normally you could use pedigree to make smart bets about who can make a game but there have been so many buy outs and shake ups that a lot of the AAA studios have been gutted. Who is a hit maker now?
Do they? That doesn't seem like a guarantee. Battlefront 2 was the most high profile game in recent memory I can think of. An otherwise fun game that bombed so hard because of microtransactions EA had to remove all of them and basically gave up on developing it.
The article brings up a few reasons for why this has happened, such as the end of ZIRP and the complete lack of curation on platforms like Steam making it hard for titles to stand out. I guess if you're a publisher, you have a better chance of making a return on investment by funding 20 pixel art or friendslop titles and hoping one of them goes viral rather than funding 1 title like the new Myst sequel and hoping it doesn't get buried on Steam and the Nintendo eshop.