I don't think Sony hyped anything. They simply said, "hey, we're going to present our GDC content publicly based on our design philosophy and some of the systems capabilities." I don't think it is any different than Microsoft dropping a bomb on a Monday.
Maybe people are just generally excited about PlayStation 5? It can be that simple.
They knew gamers were thirsty for PS5 news, so they advertised the conference on Twitter, a popular social media platform. That's called building up hype, there's no other way to spin it.
Cerny's presentation touched as lightly on any negatives regarding their approach as possible, and focused on positive aspects of it. Smart, but can be seen as hyping it up. The gamers who aren't developers or techheads (who comprised the vast majority watching the stream) basically went into viewing it as hype because they had already been at least partially aware of next-gen news and rumors by that point. So in a sense the presentation - for them - played off of hype that Sony somewhat helped feed by advertising the event to them on Twitter.
I never said people aren't genuinely excited about PS5. Hell, I'm genuinely excited for PS5 and interested in seeing how its advantages will be flexed. But I am noticing a lopsided trend among a lot of gaming press post-Wednesday that are attempting to paint its advantages in SSD memory controller speed as significantly closing the gap on differentials in TF, GPU complexity/size, or other areas XSX seems to have the notable advantage in on paper (and very likely in practice too, same with PS5's SSD).
It gets almost comical when these people are positioning the SSDs in either system as "game changers" that will revolutionize the way games are made, because anyone who understands the inherent limitations of NAND technology and how flash memory controllers work, even as a memory-mapped v-cache, knows that there's embellishment going on there. Meanwhile none of these same types are discussing the extra GPGPU throughput the XSX has, or seem to even understand how GPGPU
works and
can work, despite many PS4 exclusively leveraging it this very past generation.
Out of the two, GPGPU is easily the more significant of the two "game changer" design-enabling technologies (well, more like methodology for GPGPU, but it's strengthened by technologies such as unified memory pools, something both system have) for next-gen, but if and how 3rd-parties can easily utilize it is another matter. Meanwhile, Sony's seemingly made their SSD setup as transparent and automatic to developers as possible and it's relatively "newer" in the console space than GPGPU, so those are probably two factors adding to its mystique.
That all said, the way some of these gaming outlets are framing the two systems is "well, this one is sleek, optimized and punches above its weight (PS5)", and "this one's brute-forcing its way to an advantage, kinda neanderthalish (XSX)", which is very inaccurate on both system's accounts. There's arguably at least as much optimization and customization into XSX as there is PS5, but Sony made it a point to message theirs directly to gamers and their areas of notable advantages offer more "free" performance gains (as in, requires very little actual effort or optimization by developers) to take advantage of.
Still though it should be the responsibility of gaming outlets to try framing the systems more correctly as to their true strengths and unique advantages, and I'd say this forum's done a better job at it than the majority of gaming outlets out there TBQH. Hopefully over time the outlets will even out their focus on system advantages and technologies, though that is partly up to Sony and MS to set the tone for such. And quite frankly, I think outlets are just refreshed to talk about next-gen in a way besides simply TFs, which I agree was getting tiresome because TFs never tell the full picture of system performance.
Really quick, to address the GDC post some are putting up, you do have to ask yourself what third-party developer without an exclusive dev/pub deal for a title on a given system, would even speak about either next-gen system in a way so as to show public preference for one over the other when neither has actually launched. Someone else brought this up in the thread and they're 100% correct on the matter. Never mind when it is a 1st-party developer doing so; everyone will know where their priorities are and that's completely fair of them.
But a 3rd party doing such, if they have no strong preferred branding deal or dev partnership with Sony or MS? It's almost like a kiss of death by them and could have repercussions in support by the competing platform holder as a result. No smart studio is going to risk being that brazen even to someone like Jason Schreir unless they have something going on with one platform holder in particular, which probably rules out any of the big AAA 3rd-party devs or publishers.