Even if it were the best year for the products (there are several titles in the article that are curious), it’s definitely one of the worst years for the people who work on them.

For sure. As an armchair analyst, it seems to be the result of getting out of the era of cheap credit and VC money. I don't expect it to get worse, but I do think live services and enormous open world games ran out of money spreading their customers across too many games.