That probably has more to do with the human bottleneck in games, than anything else.
Big open world is good, if you can manage to fill the big open world with stuff. But procedural generation is annoying and repetitive, but at the same time handcrafting a world is time and labor intensive. See: Cyberpunk 2077
Go back nine years today and things don't feel that different from now. People still buy Skyrim.