This is an unfair claim. Games aren't purposefully bloated so they are harder to pirate. 4k textures are 16 times larger than 1k textures, so even with large amounts of compression, just the switch to 4k textures will likely make games 10x larger than they were. Games nowadays come with localised audio which is often uncompressed because storage has gotten larger, cheaper and faster, and it drastically reduces the cpu overhead of audio playback which can be a significant chunk of time and is a very noticeable issue when it stutters.
Games also have significantly more content than they had in the earlier days because people demand it. Starfox (a game mentioned in the article) has a "completionist" time [0] of 5 hours - compre that to a game like Monster Hunter Rise (I used this as an example as I'm playing it right now), that has a main story play time of 15 hours [1].
[0] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=9035 [1] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=83169