[Blog post has been deleted, but leaving this up so people's comments don't get deleted. Sorry for inconvenience, but thanks for reading!]
Not to be unfashionably optimistic but I think we are seeing slivers and glimmers of the big publishers kind of backing off the strategy of visual fidelity and scope above everything. There's two trends to observe here.
One is legacy franchises getting lower-fidelity/scope installments to go alongside with, or sometimes in lieu of, big AAA releases. Nintendo's done this a bunch, of course. You have the Link's Awakening remake and now Echos of Wisdom. You have Metroid Dread, you have Super Mario Wonder. This sort of interleaving of big AAA releases with smaller-scoped installments feels designed exactly to combat that feeling that these franchises lie dormant for years and years due to incredibly long development cycles.
But we're also seeing this from other publishers, like Ubisoft with Prince of Persia. Ubisoft also even backed off on the scope of the last Assassin's Creed game; I think even the suits are increasingly cognizant of how unsustainable things have gotten.
The other noticeable trend is an increasing drive towards stylization over photorealism. Photorealism has lost its value; nowadays a lot of the things that used to be signifiers of 'money on the screen' are an Unreal asset store trip away. As a result, there's tons of shovelware out there gracelessly imitating the photorealistic AAA visual style, and consequently devaluing it. Art direction is worth more than fidelity, right now. Meanwhile things like Fortnite and Genshin Impact have proven how little 'core gamers' actually care about visual fidelity.
The big sort of weathervane of this for me is the upcoming Dragon Age game, which has a much more stylized look than past installments of the franchise. Even what theoretically should be a prototypically bloated and overscoped AAA release isn't trying to play the photorealism game any more.
Obviously, 2d games or stylized games can have crunch or overlong production cycles. But I think the market trends that drove a lot of current-gen AAA excess are not permanent, and things are shifting. Ultimately, of course, the old economist's maxim holds: if something can't go on forever it will stop.