I don’t think it’s the difficulty of games that makes them take so long for me. Just that everything is so bloated now. There’s so much to do, but so little of it actually adds to the experience.
I appreciate that a lot of games have realised this and let you differentiate between “go this way to see the end of the game” and “here is some bullshit if you’re not getting another game until Christmas”.
Like sure, I could deliver every parcel in Death Stranding, and really get into the class fantasy of being a post apocalyptic Deliveroo driver, but I’m just mainlining the story quests at this point. Which is taking long enough on its own.