I don't think it's exclusively fat cats asking for games to be dumbed down, though I'm sure that's part of it. I think another aspect of it may be the developers themselves misinterpreting fan interest resulting in the flanderization of certain concepts due to their popularity. This process is really obvious with the Fallout games.
A big part of the fun of both classic and modern Fallout is getting new weapons. For a lot of people it's a big part of why they like modern Fallout. As the series went on, that aspect became focused on more and more, until the series went straight up RNG-based weapon loot with 4, then Fallout 76 became solely about the RNG-based weapon loot gameplay loop. The thing is a lot of people liked it at each step, but the increased focus on that element of design came at the cost of (or at least alongside a lack of) focus on the things that made the previous games liked, until the series ended up becoming solely about this one element.
