There's a deep sentiment here about childhood joys becoming less and less fun as concerns about time and money rule our lives, but it's obfuscated by some really shallow takeaways. AAA video games represent a large chunk of the video game industry, not video games themselves. A lot of the medium-specific complaints only apply to big-budget titles and do a really poor job of framing why video games might feel less fun as we get older. It has the same vibe as someone talking about how movies are worse now while exclusively discussing the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or how music got less interesting to listen to while only talking about whatever plays on the radio. All that really happened is that certain corporate executives helming large, loud companies figured out how to effectively extract money from consumers. Making claims like "storytelling was better back then" only really indicates that you haven't put in the energy to discover less mass-marketed titles like Kentucky Route Zero or Disco Elysium, which illustrate how games have matured in their tone and narrative capabilities over time. Stop playing whatever is marketed to you the loudest, and you might just find that videos games have somehow become as fun as you remember them.