Hard to say if any of this is real since it doesn't actually reveal anything that we can ever verify.
The real story is just that Bethesda has never been a great development studio. This is the real history of Bethesda. They were one of the first to get to this new and popular model of open world games. Being first, people overlooked a lot of problems they've had as a studio since the very beginning. Their gameplay has never been great. Their animations have never been good. Their graphics are hit and miss but have never been industry leading. Their boss fights are non-existent. Their stories have never been great either, they just coasted on the novelty of being very big games mostly.
Fast forward about 10 years and the entire industry has more than caught up. Everyone can now make giant open world games that dwarf anything seen in Skyrim. Xenoblade X on Wii U was 4x the size of Fallout 4, and had no loading, and fast vehicular driving / flying. Final Fantasy is huge open world. Even action games are open world now, like Batman, Metal Gear V, Spider Man. And these games have top tier gameplay, top tier animations, top tier graphics. All those studios that have been good at gameplay this entire time now also can do open world. What can Bethesda do? Nothing.
On top of this, all those studios had to make new, modern engines to catch up and join the open world trend. Bethesda meanwhile coasted on their old shit this whole time. Not only have they coasted on an old engine, they have essentially just made the same game for 20 years. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4. They are all almost the exact same game. It's all been copy and pasted with very little innovation or change, just mostly deleting their complex stuff to streamline and dumb it down.
So here we are in 2018 and people are finally starting to notice that they never were very good. The competition has lapped them about 4x. Even FPS devs are now making gorgeous open world games now, like Horizon.
