Only the effect remains

Re: that 2025 games poll, aside from the obvious point (who has the time to play 115 games in 1 year? Of course everyone scores low) I don't think it's all that unreasonable. You even get a little stat-sheet of which games people are playing.

But also, look at the top of that list. Sequel to beloved indie game, friendslop, sequel to beloved indie game, sequel to beloved indie game, Pokémon. If you ignore the Nintendo house names you have to drop to 14th place to find a AAA game, with a whopping 8% play rate.

Why would you play a game in its launch year? If it's a multiplayer game, or live service, or you want to take part in the community, then you do need to get in early. But if you sit around for a few years, you can usually get the game at a lower price, with bug fixes and DLC and community guides and mods and a mature review opinion to say if it's actually worth your time.

It's no longer the case that this year's games look noticeably better than last year's games, and with downloads and online shopping you don't need to worry about what's in stock. On PC, games released today have to compete against decades of existing games. Mobile gaming is especially dominated by F2P live service games, but they're popular across platforms.

This article suggests that the % of playtime spend on this-year releases is in the single digits. You can check the most played games on Steam yourself.

It helps that classic FF combat is just the fighter spamming attack / the black mage spamming their colour-coded spell 99% of the time.  The roles of DPS are so simple that you don't lose much by letting the AI handle it.  Or rather, since you can tell the AI to switch classes mid-battle, putting them into a specific DPS(/tank) class is about all the control you need.

All the time that was previously spent managing an entire party can now be spent on managing a single character's moveset.  Buffing and healing get a lot more involved, and managing them becomes more essential to not getting wiped (there's no attrition across battles, and accordingly the game is tuned so that harder filler battles will wipe you if you don't play well).  

I've been putting Hope as my party leader, whose 3 classes are magic DPS / buffer (defensive specialism) / healer.  Again like XIV healers, the damage-dealing part isn't really that interesting on its own.  Rather, it's a reward for optimising the other parts—if you set up your buffs right, or take a risk by letting HP get low, you get more time to squeeze in extra damage.  You can also use the massive AoE of the -ga spells to CC large enemy crowds, which is a fun tactical play.