Absolutely agree on Red Dead Redemption 2. Another point considering it’s an open world game it plays extremely linearly and sometimes in missions it tells you that you can’t leave a certain area for no reason.
Lower budgets would probably be better. High budgets mean high risk, developers and publishers try to minimize that risk and you get bland games that try to cater to too many tastes. Movies suffer from the same problem. They get budgets in the hundreds of millions and you wonder what they spent it all for.