I disagree with this thesis.

The people that make the games are what matter, the labourers. The problem at bethesda isn't just "wrong decisions" it's the people themselves, because in order to make the "correct decisions" you have to have a different ideology.

The kinds of people who make the decisions "let's make thousands of planets and have literally all of them be completely randomly generated in an ultra-lazy way except for these key landmarks" are making that decision because they're the same kinds of people that believe randomly generated ai art is the future. They believe in crypto and pods and all sorts of techbro shite.

So what do these teams full of this ideology produce? Utter slop. The sloppiest slop ever. They think "people will love slop if we just make A LOT of slop". They're ideologically inclined to make mediocre shit and believe if the mediocre shit is just a huge, enormous, massive pile of shit then it has more value.

This isn't something you can correct with telling them "make the correct decisions". They are ideologically inclined to this decision and will not correct it. The wrong people are in the team. Every single person that cared about making anything good left Bethesda long ago.