I think zelda proves that its the devs who no longer have the passion, the talent or the ambition to pull off these massive leaps we have come to expect. Everyone wondered why the PS4 gen was just an extension of the PS360 gen. People blamed jaguar CPUs. Devs blamed HDDs. Some blamed bigger budgets, open world and gaas trends for a lack of a meaningful upgrade in gameplay which saw little to no innovations gen on gen even last gen. Then zelda comes out with a way worse processor than the jaguar CPUs, no ssd, and a GPU even worse than the PS3, and showed everyone that anything is possible if you actually want to do it.
I always wondered why Far Cry 2 was far more physics based and interactive than anything that came after it. Same with Crysis and to a lesser extent Infamous, GTA4 and Mass Effect 1. We got a pretty decent GPU bump in the PS4 era (9x) and a massive VRAM jump (10-20x), and devs just kinda forgot about interactivity and went all in on graphics and vast (empty) open worlds with no real interactivity or simulations. Surely, some of that couldve been offloaded to the GPU but they didnt even try. Nintendo tried and got it all to run on PS3 era hardware.
No one will convince me that with the massive increase in CPU and SSD bandwidth, we should be expecting incremental upgrades. Some dev said that Nintendo was showing up AAA devs working on 10x more powerful hardware. It's actually 63x if you go by tflops and compare the handheld tflops 0.190 to xbox series x's 12.1 tflops. Just imagine what Nintendo could do with the 3.5 ghz 8 core 16 thread CPUs and then ask why we are getting such incremental upgrades this gen.
Again, not even talking about visual upgrades here. There is so much to do in terms of technological breakthroughs and innovation and so much power at their fingertips and they are just coasting. Thank God for Zelda.