A lot of games for early consoles and PCs also had to optimise and squeeze the last few kilobytes out of the space that was available to them in distribution - which forced some devs to compromise on quality and others became extremely crafty and made completely novel approaches for data compression at the time. This may be just my personal opinion but i feel like games that pushed the envelope, furthered mechanics and technology beyond what everybody else was doing and therefore needed smart devs with good ideas to actually pull it off.. just were more fun to play. Today studios can throw assets like you described uncompressed on a server and call it a day, less consideration, faster development turnover, better for the publishers but probably not as polished of a game. Not saying that only uber-brainiacs who can code in 10 different assembly dialects should make games but rather that more bigger, more polys, more resolution, more everything is not always better.

Pamphlets are indeed better imo if they convey the same information as a 500 page book that describes everything in excruciating detail 🙃