This is a relatively recent attitude. OG gamers expected to have their hair blown back through some combination of novel game mechanics, setting, and storyline pretty much every title every time, and if a game didn't deliver it didn't sell.
That is not my experience having gamed "seriously" since 1992. Everyone has different tastes. And besides folks over identifying with a console or platform, I recall most folks just trying a lot of different things then settling into what they enjoyed.
Sports games in particular have always been popular through many phases of low/no innovation because that just wasn't a priority to most of that demographic.
Your expectations remind me more of GameGate than 90s and oughts era gaming.
Are you quite certain about that? https://archive.org/details/Lemonade_Stand_1979_Apple
OG gamer here (started on the Fairchild Channel F). This is absurd.
What is true is that the hardware rapidly advanced, and as programmers got familiar with each platform the software also advanced, but the shelves were full of stinkers and disappointments and copycats.