I’ve noticed a trend in a lot of modern games that there seems

Really, the answer here is scope. Now that the character models have fingers, toes, ears, physics-driven hair, muscle deformation, cloth simulation, and a never-ending series of fidelity improvements, we now need artists, animators, and engineers to build systems and assets for all of that fidelity.

Not too long ago, I built a small "filler" quest scenario that was really fairly simple to help fill out our game's open world gameplay. The player could find a shipping container out in the world while wandering around. If the player got too close to the container, the doors would burst open and a randomly-selected monster would pop out and try to kill her. There would also be a treasure chest inside the container guarded by the monster as a reward. It was a very simple, cut-and-dry quest scenario to give something to do and a small reward to exploring players.

The shipping container itself, however, ended up needing a massive amount of work to bring it up to the necessary fidelity.

• We needed two different models for the container, both closed and open, because the closed container needed to block the AI navmesh so no AI could path through it while it was closed, but they would need to be able to path through it while open.
• We needed door pop-open animations for the container.
• We needed explosion VFX for when the doors popped open.
• We needed environment art to do a special lighting pass, because light could illuminate the inside of the container

Back in the older days, we didn't need to do a lot of this work because it wasn't expected. Today, we do. The natural tradeoff is that we lose a lot of the smaller polish details that we used to be able to put in, because those smaller polish details cost a lot more dev resources today than they did back in the day.

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