As technology has improved, the strain on artists to optimize assets has almost entirely disappeared. Back when everything had to fit on a single DVD and disc read speeds were of utmost importance, we had to constantly hammer on the artists to remove polygons, reduce texture resolution, reuse assets, etc etc. We would always have to make artists cut up scenes and decimate the assets they spent weeks making look nice and pretty.
Nowadays since there is so much storage and SSDs are everywhere, the artists have gotten cocky and programmers have gotten lazy so the hammering on optimizing assets is barely existent. Every texture will be 4k resolution instead of 512 or lower, even if it's just for shitty tree bark. A character you see in the distance will have 100k polygons instead of the old forced reduction to 3k for distant characters. No games read directly from physical media anymore, everything loads from a fast SSD so even with shitty assets, it's still mostly acceptable.
When you still see long load times in games even though you have an SSD, it's generally because of bullshit like this. If game studios still had the discipline they had 10 years ago, those long load times would be completely gone in many games.
I mean, at least the shitty load times are somewhat tolerable in the smartphone age. What pisses me off is that if I have a console with 'only' one tb of space, I can't even fit 10 games like this on it. It's a complete waste of space. Maybe if NVMEs get cheap enough we'll go back to using cartriges.
MS and Sony won't be pressuring devs to reduce the size of their games. How else will they sell you the 2tb edition of the console if they do that :)
Why the fuck do all these AAA games need that much space? Is every potential cutscene rendered as a 4k video file? Are they using sweatshop labor to create molecularly detailed textures and models for every single blade of grass? I feel like a cheap unity remake of most of these things would at most top out at 20gb, probably less.