It's almost like companies handing out work to the lowest bidder results in much lower quality products. I wonder if someone ever wrote something discussing that idea?

I have a conspiracy theory about this. There was a brief period when Nintendo had great third party games coming out of its first party franchises, and then it suddenly stopped and we entered the slop era - I believe it's because the company made this an official policy to make their first party dev teams look better by comparison by only giving licenses to cut rate developers (and also screw them over with impossible schedules, low budgets, etc). That's why we will never see titles like F Zero GX (Sega) or Zelda the Minish Cap (Capcom) again.