I'm glad I'm not alone with my thinking, I was starting to think my negative attitude towards modern games was mostly just me.
First I'd like to thank you for addressing those points separately, I should have separated them when I wrote that but just didn't which was a mistake.
These days 20 minutes for a youtube gameplay video will barely get past the tutorial sections. It's actually another reason I dislike modern games, it takes ages just to learn the basic controls for a game compared to the NES or SNES era. Now that I think it over it's also a reason why I dislike Ocarina of Time as I hated that opening village section which I found incredibly boring, I would usually shut off the game before leaving this section and just play something else. With people buying games regardless of quality, I really believe a big part of this is people buying games to review on youtube or make let's play videos, or general twitch streaming. It's not for enjoyment, it's for content creation. The more bugs and crap to complain about, the more entertaining it is for the intended audience.
As for which current console is better, I don't have personal experience with using any of them so I'm probably not fully informed correctly, I've just seen a lot of people preferring the current Xbox exclusives over the PS5 exclusives. Like with the latest Spider-Man game for PS5 which has tons of severe bugs. Also the Xbox online services are apparently cheaper priced than the PS5 online services, which apparently had a recent price increase as well. I never use online services so I wouldn't know, it just seems like there's a lot of complaints towards Sony these days except from the fanboys. Plus Sony tried and failed to prevent the Microsoft merger with Activision Blizzard, it just seems like Sony is in a worse position compared to Microsoft.
As for the Switch, it still has a library that looks more appealing to me compared to the other consoles. Maybe eventually I'll get one, but I'm reluctant as it doesn't seem super reliable for the long term compared to earlier consoles. You're right about there being more indie games on it, many of those are what appeals to me, and modern releases of classic franchises such as Wild Guns, Pocky and Rocky, and several others.
You are right about games being designed to waste the player's time, it's to market the game as having more hours of gameplay so it can be sold for a higher price. You've already pointed out something I was going to mention as well, game maps are made bigger than ever, but there's not really any additional content so it just takes longer to travel between the actual gameplay. To be fair, plenty of older games in the past were also made like this, such as all the adventure games that included arcade sequences. It's just way more common with modern games, like games that need to be played multiple times to experience multiple paths or endings, or skill trees in games that aren't RPGs like FPS or action games. Multiple paths and endings can be well designed depending on the game, but I'm thinking more like Telltale's King's Quest game which has three paths to play through(really just three ways to solve each puzzle which affects the ending), this just feels like artificially lengthening the game. Plus forced online gameplay or other questionable design decisions, mostly added so watching a youtube playthrough won't be "good enough" compared to most one-player narrative based games.
With how enjoyable modern games seem to be, I think back to the arcade days when you had to wait in line, or with early consoles when visiting a friend's house.
Arcade/early consoles: "This game looks fun, I want to play it!"
360/PS3 era: "This game and story looks interesting, but the controls look complicated and annoying. I want to watch a playthrough on Youtube."
Current era: "This game just looks tedious. I'd rather watch a movie or random youtube videos."
Obviously there are some exceptions but I mostly don't care about modern games at all, the characters and stories just don't interest me with most current games. I suppose I could think of specific reasons why that is, but it would take me awhile. It's mostly either terrible gameplay, or terrible writing when a game focuses heavily on the narrative or character development.