I definitely agree that I'd rather see devs focus on other stuff besides graphics, and I do agree that right now there's a big focus on samey sequels that essentially boil down to "more of the same".
At the same time though I can understand devs and publishers, bacause that's what sells . If you are spending $200 million on a game do you make a samey sequel that's guaranteed to sell several million or do you take a risk with a new IP with very creative but untested gameplay?.
Modern gamers are spoiled. They want super creative gameplay but also the game need to look incredible and it needs to run at high resolution and high framerate and it still needs to feature all the samey stuff like combat, quests, story, skills trees, etc, and it can't be cross gen because that automatically mean it's bad, and also it needs to be at lest 40 hours long
"Everything is just movie games with no real gameplay"
"Hey did you see this game Viewfinder that just came out and is doing some cool stuff?"
"That doesn't count because it's an indie and also the the graphics aren't photo real and there's no combat and it's not based on an IP I like. I'm going to buy Diablo 4 instead and complain that it has microtransactions"
Imagine Shadow of the Colossus coming out today in it's original state running at 15fps during fights and looking very dated compared to AAA game on PC. It would get destroyed by criticism