That's exactly what people are afraid of though. Then it has literally nothing to do with what is actually the best game that year, and more to do with what statement the site wants to make.
I'm not sure why it can't be both. Someone can say "My favourite game this year is Dark Souls" while simultaneously saying "I want to send the message that the industry should not be afraid to make more games like Dark Souls (difficult, challenging, open-discovery based, inventive approach to multiplayer)".
I think when I look back on a year of TV or games or music or whatever, I see certain patterns and trends and I group the stuff I've experienced into different sorts of groups. It's not hard to see how The Sopranos, The Shield, and The Wire give way to Breaking Bad or Justified, while Low Winter Sun and Ray Donovan are desperate and failed attempts to recapture that spirit. Right? When someone says Breaking Bad is their show of the year, they mean it, but they also mean to point out that it exemplifies its cohort or the direction the industry has taken or the direction the industry will or should take in terms of the emphasis on anti-heroes or grit or whatever the thing they identify as being best about the show. A lot of praise for Breaking Bad contextualized it as "the end of the anti-hero era", "the last great show in the mould of the Sopranos", etc.
When someone picks a launch game, they're sending the message about the potential of what's to come, or if they pick a late-generation game they're saying "it all built to this".
Voting is a comparative thing. It's about experiencing a lot of different stuff, this year and in past years, and looking at what's to come, and fitting everything together. It's why a 13 year old comes out of some shitty movie of the week and says "That's the best movie I've ever seen", because he's immature and he doesn't know shit and has no perspective. And more experience gives him more perspective, to be able to compare things to other things over periods of time and across different countries and stuff.
So when someone says they loved Gone Home, what they mean is both that they loved Gone Home but also that they see it as something building on previous works (the connections to Minerva's Den are obvious, but also to classic PnC in terms of object interactivity, the way the themes match up with the emerging genre of sort of personal experience games but also the ongoing conversation about gender and sexual orientation and participation in the gaming community, the way this kind of game couldn't exist 5 years ago because the pricepoint / digital distribution / the fact that Gaynor is a refugee from sort of big development gone wrong). And maybe not everyone thinks about all of those things, but end-of-year voting is about having a conversation and telling a story about how things have changed and where they're still going.
The Last of Us is absolutely the culmination of a generation of work for Naughty Dog. The game very obviously builds on lessons from Uncharted, the theme I think builds on previous explorations of the setting, the level of grit and tone they were able to achieve obviously comes on the back of previous creative works (both games and non-games), the fact that they were able to get a game greenlit with a young girl as one of the protagonists
reflects trends in the industry. I think the partner AI builds on stuff. I think crafting builds on stuff that's popular, including the popularity of Minecraft. I think the length of the games steadily building from UC1 -> UC2 -> TLOU is pretty obvious. I think being able to turn off listen mode is a reflection of push-back against overly intrusive HUDs and a part of the narrative that started sort of with Assassin's Creed or Dead Space to have more integrated mechanics and UIs but then also with Demon's and Dark Souls to really want challenge and difficulty. I think the incorporation of RPG elements and stealth elements into an otherwise action game is a long time coming. This doesn't mean I think people voting for The Last of Us are being insincere, it means that I think beyond the work in a vacuum, some of the reason why people engage with stuff is because they compare it and see it as a part of a temporal order.
I feel pretty bad for someone who plays a game and at the end says "dem feels . gif :bow based game sogood GOTF GOAT can't wait to watch dat salt flo tho from dem mad doggiessss ownt!!!!" or whatever and that's literally the limits of their intellectual capacity to engage with what they just played. I mean, pretty clearly those kinds of people are out there. I'm glad even the hackiest and worst elements of the press try to thing longer-term and bigger-picture than that though.
Does it really test any boundaries, though? The story basically amounts to "look, lesbians!" It doesn't really say anything new or compelling about anything, and the gameplay aspect isn't exactly groundbreaking either, let alone well-executed (technical issues mentioned earlier).
I mean...if acknowledging that lesbians exist is pushing boundaries, then Mass Effect did that years ago.
That's not really what the story is at all and there's more to storytelling than plot. If you don't like the game that's fine, but it seems more like you didn't quite understand it.
