As I'm turning 40 this year, I've also regressed back playing old games, I find them so much more fun than new games.
Graphics and presentation are so much better than back in the old times, but everyone has their preferences for this - some like big tits, some small tits. That's something that cannot be debated.
The thing is, games have always been bullshit. The only thing that has changed during these years is how the games were designed to waste your time. So is this era the best ever or the worst depends how you grew up in games wasting your time.
8-bit days; hard and punishing difficulty to make you LEARN to play better either by skill or just pure memorization -OR- a lot of replayability, as the games were short and could be completed within an hour. I'm the Nintendo generation and started as 2-year old with my dad's 1984 PC XT, then NES in 1989. I play old 8-bit games just out of habit, but I find only a very small handful of 8-bit games are actually worth playing these days because of the "git gud" timewasting spec. There was no alternative back then, so you either had to get good or give up. These days, it's just plain bullshit and not really fun.
16-bit days; Punishing difficult started to get toned down, but replayability was high as the games were still quite short. RPGs started to get interesting storylines and weren't tied so much to budgets, so they had more possibility for weird experimentations. Replayability was king and gameplay had to be good for people want to replay the games. This is my favourite era with the early 32-bit gen. Perfect replayability and not too punishing difficulty.
32-bit and 128-bit days; Evolution of 16-bit days, but presentation started to get in front of replayability. Small budgets still made possible for experimentation in gameplay. The height of arcade type gameplay, short experiences with good replayability. Start of the movie games and less punishent unless arcade-type genre.
Now here comes the big cutoff. The next gens, starting with 360/PS3/Wii, it's been pretty much the same after that. As replayability fully diminished in one generation to be replaced with MAU, to keep people playing the games we just started to have evolution of wasting people's time using either monetization or just making the games drag on. Game dev gets more and more expensive from PS3->PS4->PS5. As single player experiences give the least amount of RoI for the devs and pubs per every generation after 360/PS3, the time wasting element is made to bring as much money as possible.
For us who grew up during the gameplay/replayability time, today's infinite XP bars and instant gratification in progression just feels like eating a cardboard. As many of the millenials started late PS2/Xbox-early PS3/360 era, they are used to this scheme of grinding 300 hours XP boosts, while skipping the single player campaign which has checkpoints every 3 seconds and no penalizing of death. I enjoy some of these games just for the insane visuals and presentation, but they're absolute trash in replayability. Sony's first party games (especially Naughty Dog's and Santa Monica's) are perfect example of this, enjoy the rollercoaster once and then into the trash it goes.
For the OP, he seems to be enjoying the same era as I'm enjoying. Good enough presentation with precise gameplay. I can replay Castlevania IV like every week once and I never get tired of it. 90% of the games after 360, I can't even remember what their campaigns were about.
Final note: What I'm happy about these days is the B-level stuff is starting to appear again, but I wish it would be more than remakes/remasters of old games. The Trials of Mana remake was absolutely the best game I played in the last 3 years, something like that with an original idea would get my money and my attention.
Edit: it just hit me. OP, it's not about the games being worse. You're just not getting dopamine anymore from games. Divert your attention to a new drug.
