It's always interesting to hear from younger people playing games much older than themselves and what their impressions of them are without the cultural context of the time or sometimes even an understanding of hardware limitations. In my case that's usually just hearing from youtubers, but your opinion seems the prevalent one from what I can tell, which is nice to hear.

I think you forgot how many absolutely trash games were being made.

Cartridge games yeah, I was alive and buying 60-80 dollar N64 games. I agree with your peak era opinion.

I think 360/PS3 middle of their lifespan was the beginning of the decline, but that was gradual.

I don't agree, but my tolerance for mediocrity is admittedly rather low compared to most people. Out of 1370 NES/Famicom games most are garbage, seal or not. Then a lot of mediocre games. Then a small portion of actually stand-out good games. This is true of every console and every era of PC gaming.

More games than ever are released now, OP only considers AAA which has both heavy quality decline combined with far less output thanks to bloated corporations that can't imagine making cheaper games on shorter time scales with smaller and more focused teams.

Television has the same problem as the mega gaming corps who have bought each other up. Used to get 12-24 episodes a season per year. Now we get 8 episodes with 2+ years between seasons.

Which I'm fine with, indie can be far more creatively interesting (when not pumping out shovelware) than LCD multi million safe bet cater to everyone appeal to no one monetized whaling slop released broken and stuttering for 80 dollars for only the hacked up base game with no respect for art just the dollar.