Normally, you'd have to pay me to read a Polygon article, but since I was already there, I bit the bullet and gave it a read anyway.
As a boomer (Millennial), the question of "why do so many video games suck these days" has often crossed my mind and dominated conversation with my friends and family members, and the article does bring up some points that are valid. For me, when I think of the 'Golden Age' of games, I think of the PS2/GCN/XBOX era, and I try to think about what the environment was like for video games then.
To the best of my surface-level understanding of the time, there was almost a video game gold rush from publishers, where leaders would greenlight just about every idea that came across their desk in the hopes of striking gold with at least one of them. Thinking about that reminds me of an article I read regarding Nike and their success which was attributed to the mobility of their business. Essentially, the article noted that Nike was not afraid to try out a myriad of ideas and strategies simultaneously in order to see what works, then focusing on cultivating those successes while continuing to experiment with new ideas at a rapid pace. Essentially, they're willing to invest in 11 bad ideas if they can strike gold with just 1. It's similar to what Blumhouse does with horror movies, and although their name may not carry much prestige, they are wildly successful.
During the aforementioned PS2 era, I think publishers had that mobility, and as a result, we got a lot of terrible, mediocre, or uninspired games, but we also got plenty of absolute gems that could only exist in an environment where experimentation was the norm. This is where the article and I agree on: major publishers are of the mind that each release NEEDS to be #1 or meet standards of all other legendary releases in order to be successful; consequently, budgets inflate to insane proportions until the only way it's possible for the game to make any profit is to actually become a #1 best seller. The movie industry is facing a similar problem where every studio has decided that a movie is only successful if it can surpass 1 billion at the box office, so now small movies that only deserve a 30mil budget are hyper inflated to 200-300mil, then when you factor in advertising and everything else, that once-little project now NEEDS to make 1 billion in order to bring home any profit at all.
That's just my limited understanding of the issue, and I don't have any easy solutions. I do think that indie games CAN compound the issue as the article stated, but I think the article definitely overestimates indie games' ability to compete with an actual studio-made game with some advertising and big-name publishers behind it. So, in short, my boomer brain says that publishers should stop trying to compete with and copy GTA or TLoU, and should instead focus on producing more lower/mid budget games in the hopes of finding the next big thing and capitalizing on that.