That's exactly it. You put it better than I could. Lazy design begets more lazy design. We can't let the players drive their own experience, because that's hard to do, so we'll more tightly control the experience. Oh no, we narrowed the field of possibilities so much that this is essentially a theme park ride, let's add a bunch of visual elements and vertical/horizontal movement to disguise the lack of player agency. Oh no, we did so many things to obfuscate the linearity of the design that we made it confusing to navigate, let's add visual indicators to the only viable pathway so that players don't get lost. Oh no, our visual indicators break immersion because there's no in-game reason why all this stuff should be painted yellow. Oh well, I guess we'll ship it anyways and then fire 200 developers so that the stock price goes up.
That's exactly it. You put it better than I could. Lazy design begets more lazy design. We can't let the players drive their own experience, because that's hard to do, so we'll more tightly control the experience. Oh no, we narrowed the field of possibilities so much that this is essentially a theme park ride, let's add a bunch of visual elements and vertical/horizontal movement to disguise the lack of player agency. Oh no, we did so many things to obfuscate the linearity of the design that we made it confusing to navigate, let's add visual indicators to the only viable pathway so that players don't get lost. Oh no, our visual indicators break immersion because there's no in-game reason why all this stuff should be painted yellow. Oh well, I guess we'll ship it anyways and then fire 200 developers so that the stock price goes up.