The 'PC gaming is dead' comments come back. Please stop, the truth is staring you in the face, or you're choosing to look away or wear jet-black shades while saying it's dead.
We have this incredibly advanced tech in 2024 that renders the game in 720p then upscales it to 1080p, adds fake frames on top, then with a $500 1080p focused 4060 ti GPU, God willing you may get 60 FPS. 106 base fps? Optimization? What am I even reading here?!
Sounds like a bandaid/patch...
MVP: Minimum Viable Product. More and more gamers have become accustomed to eating this crap, so where's the incentive for publishers/devs to stop? A [insert favorite flavor here] covered turd is still a turd.
As newcomers join this hobby, they grow up into MVPs being the norm, and the older groups get flushed out... This is currently in progress.
A publisher/dev having their own beta testers is less of a thing. More often, it's the customer paying to beta test.
Preordering digital copies? Why? They're not going to sell out... or perhaps it's the overpriced shiny goods on offer...
So many studios do crunch time too - which isn't healthy - still deliver crap, and people(SOME) still eat it up.
This isn't entirely the fault of a single group. I'd take that spiderman pointing meme, add 2 more spideymen and type on each:
publisher/devs, gamers, investors, and tech companies(i.e., Nvidia).