Isn't the public opinion that games take way too long to make nowadays? They certainly don't make them fast anymore.
I think the problem here is that they announce them way too early, so people are waiting like 2-3 years for it. It's better if they are developed behind the scenes and 'surprise' announced a few months prior to launch.
Graphics have advanced of course, but it's become diminishing returns and now a lot of games have resorted to spamming post-processing effects and implementing as much foliage and fog as possible to try and make the games look better. I always bring Destiny 2 up in this conversation, because the game looks great, runs great and the graphical fidelity is amazing - no blur but no rough edges. Versus like any UE game which have terrible TAA, if you disable it then everything is jagged and aliased.
DLSS etc are defo a crutch and they are designed as one (originally for real-time raytracing), hence the better versions requiring new hardware. Games shouldn't be relying on them and their trade-offs are not worth it if you have average modern hardware where the games should just run well natively.
It's not so much us wanting specifically Skyrim, maybe that one guy, but just an extreme example I guess to put the point across. It's obviously all subjective, making things shiny obviously attracts peoples eyes during marketing.