There's a lot this doesn't explain though, for example the discourse around game length which feels related to it being seen as a product. There are also some parallels in other mediums regarding functionality, like an album being poorly mastered or a TV show or movie having bad HDR.

I've thought about this a lot and never came up with a clear answer, but I think it has to do with the idea of functionality. Games can crash, run poorly, or just not feel right, and since that's been fairly common over the medium's history, it's just part of how games are evaluated.

Well stated. The AI hype feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of what programming even is, and the trajectory it's on. The point of higher level code is not just to program concisely, but *unambiguously*, using abstractions as shorthand for specific behavior. LLMs are basically pure ambiguity.