Nothing that is or has been worse in time... False advertisement or even lack of advertisement and transparency of games has been a thing since Atari days. There is no downward spiral in that regard. Some still do it because it's something that will always happen. I'm not saying accept it and take, i'm saying it's not a new trend.
I mean, we still have Daikatana as a reference for games doing this, which started in 1995 and released 2000.
Yeah I've heard about Odyssey and the issues it had, frankly I never noticed them myself... people said you didn't get enough experience yadda yadda and it was becaue they wanted to promote XP boosts and stuff. Which, yes it's bad, although I can't relate to it. I never had experience problems and the overall of that experience to me were great. Quality of the game itself was good in my experience, which once again...doesn't mean I defend the idea of selling Xp boosts and try to alter progression for that reason, but in this case it didn't affect the game in a manner you describe to me, or what other experienced.A game which has a cash shop will almost inevitably warp the normal progression of the game in order to "Encourage" use of said cash shop. Not always. Nothing is absolute. WoW, for example, has no need to press people towards the cash shop because they can directly manipulate revenue by virtue of timegating(any form of it, not just hard locks)in a subscription-based model. And as much as I like to harp on it, WoW is fairly mild in terms of monetization. I think that's why I fight so hard against it. Because I don't want to see it slip any further down that spectrum.
Deadspace 3 is a good example. Despite being a single-player game with co-op, it had a MTX model where you could pay real money for extra resources. Resources could be found in game in limited quantities. The rate of finding these resources was, of course, designed in such a way that it was clear they wanted you to use the MTX shop. Players got around it by exploiting a bug.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a more recent example. Again, warping the player experience in order to press people towards the cash shop. Experience gains were reduced to the point where a player without a paid boost would have to complete virtually every activity in the game just to keep up with the level/difficulty curve.
Both of these were technically high-quality productions. However, the degradation of "Quality", in my view, is to the overall experience, not just the technical aspects. Things like poor launches, pre-order bonuses, and live-service failures add into this.
Which circles back to my point that Quality and exploitive schemes are and should be separate. Great games can have awful schemes and bad games can have generous schemes. We can say that it sucked for you because of the XP boost MTX while for me it was a great game despite it, it played well...and I can tell that the developers like what they do and it's shown in the actual gameplay DESPITE the cash shop.
The more politicans get replaced by a younger generation the harder it will be for companies to do exploitive schemes but then we also have to take into account of free market in which companies and anyone should be able to sell almost anything and it's up to customers to determine if it's valuable or not. Where would the line be drawn? If developers make new content, may it so be only cosmetics I think it's fair that they should be able to sell it. Should they be able to do false advertisement or tricking people into buying things to make the game work? Nope absolutely not.As for the "war on MTX", I think there are some battles being won. But the war is still very much up in the air. AAA publishers are just getting more advanced and more clever about how they manipulate players. Activision's infamous patent on matchmaking tech, and EA's patent on "dynamic skill adjustment". These are EXTREMELY powerful, complex, and intelligent tools to manipulate players out of their money.
I think a lot of people REALLY badly underestimate just how important this topic is in gaming. This industry is making billions of dollars. High-end publishers are not going to be friendly, fair, reasonable, or moderate about their approach to getting that money. And quite frankly, I find it absolutely disturbing that all it takes is a couple of screenshots, a new game announcement, or a hollow corporate apology to get players to forget this.
It's also a very complex issue since you have to prove intent which is hard to do.