Similarly, cigarettes also have a very strong correlation with schizophrenia. Completely non-causal, but it's hard to find a non-hospitalized schizophrenic who does not smoke.
There are games that are focused on being profit-driven to a fault. Pretty much anything from Activision, and most of the stuff produced by EA.
But there's plenty of games that match what you describe. Sony has published a solid lineup for the last few years. The dark souls series is a very solid example of modern skill based progression.
DLC used to exist - we just used to call them expansions.
There's also free to play games that use microtransactions as funding - but they're all either cosmetic or slight quality-of-life boosts that don't have direct gameplay impact (see: warframe and path of exile)
And that's not even talking about indies. There's plenty of indie titles that are pretty much 90s games with modern quality of life upgrades.
Some quality games that meet or exceed the quality of the 90s era from the last few years (in no particular order):
- God of War
- Horizon Zero Dawn
- Dark souls series (including bloodborne)
- Zelda Breath of the Wild
- Hyper light drifter
- Enter the Gungeon
- Spiderman
- Rimworld
- The Witcher Series
There's a ton more.. and there's also a glut of games coming out in the next couple years that also look amazing.
The thing that exists today that didn't in the past, is companies exploiting psychology to produce endorphin rushes tied to microtransactions. Companies tying gambling mechanics to gameplay advantage (FIFA and Madden are egregious examples of this).
I read in a comment on Reddit (lost the link at the moment), that it doesn't appear to be nefarious. Basically, they're trying to do feature detection based on UA instead of.. actual feature detection.