Well, that's part of the reason. Another part is that since the debut of the PlayStation, possibly a bit earlier, video games are marketed to a wider audience, and the emphasis has been shifted away from challenge and fun towards audiovisual razzle-dazzle. In order to sell to this new audience, the games had to be easy so that the average new player had a chance of beating them; and they had to make a visual impact. Sony set developer guidelines to make the graphical capabilities of the PlayStation a selling point and enforced them on third parties; in North America, for instance, sprite-based games were highly discouraged in favor of polygon games and also severely restricted. This restriction did not hold in Japan due to peculiarities of the Japanese market in which certain genres with recognizable tropes (shooters, 2D fighters, JRPGs, "visual novels") predominate.

I used to joke that the camera spin effect prominent in early PlayStation titles like Final Fantasy VII was mandated by Sony's PlayStation developer license. I still have my doubts as to whether that was entirely a joke.

Anyway, combine this massive shift in marketing emphasis with typical 90s xtr33m to the max attitude and the passel of limitations imposed by an asset pipeline that overwhelms the developers' technical capability to keep up, and you have a recipe for trivializing the medium to the point where the damage is still strongly felt today.