Agreed! I think there's also genuine uncertainty about what uses will be popular, much like the early Apple Watch iterations involved some amount of flailing to figure out what works.
The spare-no-expense approach can be seen as an effort to not close off avenues of exploration before they know what works. When optimizing for cost, decisions will be made to save money at the expense of ruling out some potential appeal, but right now nobody knows what will have appeal. The EyeSight feature seems like a prime example of something that very few would include in a product today because the appeal is uncertain while the cost is high. It might turn out to be a home run of a feature, and this luxury version of the Apple Vision product is how they can gain experience with it. If the response is instead that it looks like googly eyes, makes people uncomfortable, or doesn't achieve the goal of letting people use Vision while in the presence of others, then maybe it would find itself on the chopping block to get costs down.
I never did finish Outer Wilds and still think about it a lot! I need to go start it again because it is genuinely spectacular, but I struggle with my constraint of only being able to put short-ish play sessions into it.
Playing Ocarina of Time with my son was an epic journey I treasure. It completely captured his imagination, and I was along for that ride.
Grim Fandango was, and continues to be, a dream for me.
While I'm there, Full Throttle also executed its style so well that some of its moments still serve as cultural/stylistic landmarks in my mind.
Mass Effect 2 had several moments where the atmosphere and universe totally hit the mark (Going into the Afterlife Club... come on!).
Red Dead Redemption connected me to that setting in ways movies can't reach.
Edit: I forgot to mention Firewatch! That game established a mood unlike any other game I can think of.