"Writing" and "gameplay" are unquantifiable and risky, but the ROI on improving graphical fidelity and polygon counts is very straightforward.

Now that games are a multi-billion dollar industry, the financiers are in charge. Thus nothing about the industry should surprise you.

Especially "gaming journalists;" people who never made much money to start with and are now entirely financially dependent on advertising revenue from AAA developers. Thus their evolution from bought shills to savage attack dogs deployed to ensure you Consume Product.

This is also why Woke ideology has spread so quickly among corporations. Game journalists are transparently frustrated literature students; it was the strategy they were already indoctrinated with at their alma mater. But that strategy worked well. And the corporations noticed.

What poetically cruel irony; that newly indoctrinated progressive leftists walk straight into an industry where their ideology and talents are put to work in the service of the very rapacious capitalists they think they despise.

You can't help but marvel at it.