This describes my thoughts pretty well - in short, the chase for better graphics tends to hamstring innovation and other creative ideas; we end up playing mostly the same games but with better graphics. But I wanted to add something else, so I figured I’d use your comment as a jump-starting point.
The never ending race for better graphics that end up giving us diminishing returns, also ends up setting in us on a race of pure computing power where I feel like efficiency comes second - or not at all. It doesn’t help that poor optimization is also so common in a lot of games.
I don’t want to shill for Nvidia, but the response to the launch of the 4XXX generation was a pretty good example of that, and how a big part of the issue is also consumers. The 4060 card has great power consumption, to the point of being on par with the 1660, while performing about 2x better than it, and 1.5x better than a 2060. And to put it another way, it’s sightly better than the 3060 while using between only 60% and 70% of its power. Yet, the card was widely trashed, by both reviewers and consumers, most of which (both former and latter) never mention the efficiency of the card. A quick look up of performance videos on YouTube, will show you how people will usually just show FPS, VRAM usage, and maybe memory usage too; quite a few will only show you FPS; a surprising amount will show you pretty much anything you can think of except GPU power usage.
This is especially worrying and disheartening, when I think about how we seem to be on the verge of an energy crisis.
Most (major) games nowadays don’t look worlds better than the Witcher 3 (2015), but they still play the same as games from 2015, while requiring much better hardware with high levels of energy consumption.