and that's a good thing

Comparing Elden Ring to older games by the same company, in the same genre it was weird how many different people tell you that you can bypass that big lift to Altus Plateau.
But I can't think of other examples of dumbing down the game.
I think it's overstates at this point. Yea there is a lot of handholding in AAA games, but that's been the case for what? 15 years? more?
You still get games that respect your inteligance, and you also get people on /veee/ screeching how it's anti-fun, artificial difficulty and so on.
The amount of people who kvetched that you were expected to orient yourself where you're on the map in Hollow Knight is evidence enough that people are that dumb and need the handholding.