Comment by hibikir

This all comes down to what the hardware improvements can mean in practice. It's not as if hardware isn't moving up, but that the new kinds of things double the hardware unlocks are much smaller than they used to be.

This is best seen on the PC market. What a gaming desktop today has running on it is, compute wise, unimaginably stronger than the best available 10-20 years ago. The increases in hardware just keep coming. But there's limits on how much more you can get out of being able to push more polygons, or to put more pixels on screen. We can do all kinds of extra photorealistic things in real time that before would have to be done only in movies, and rendered in server farms for weeks at a time. But the increased difficulty doesn't quite match how impressive the extra effects are.

You can also notice this by just playing old games, and seeing how they hold up. We can make 2d pixel art games that are much better than what a SNES could do, but many of those games still hold up just fine. Meanwhile most 3d games of the Playstation and even the PS2 era are downright painful, because the increases in power between generations back then lead to big practical differences in capability. A ps5 is much stronger than a ps4, hardware wise, but it didn't unlock much at all. All the extra power can get you cooler reflections on cyberpunk, and you can go even further with a PC that has over $1000 in video cards in it. But those reflections and atmospheric effects are eating up as much hardware as the rest of the game.