It would have happened regardless. The cost of production has increased while the price of the product itself has ostensibly gone down. Like I said, adjusted for inflation, Chrono Trigger would have cost roughly $170 USD. Yes, the cost of cartridge production was relatively expensive, but that's only a portion of the overall production cost for the game. At its peak, that dev team only had like 200 developers, and that was only during part of the development. Compare that to something like an Assassin's Creed title that has 2-3x that sized team for most of the life of development.

With the costs of development increasing and the cost of the game itself remaining stagnant, it was only a matter of time. People wonder what happened to all the middleware games that existed in the 90s and early 00s. This is why they died out. Companies can't afford to take risks on titles because of ballooning production costs, so they stick to churning out recognizable IPs. tbh, they should have raised the prices a long time ago.