I feel like gaming graphics goes in waves.

First you throw hardware at the problem (e.g., release a new console/graphics card/whatever), then you throw software at the problem (new tools and tricks to extract more value from the hardware). This is why end-of-generation games look better than start-of-generation, but then you jump for a new console.

For the past 5-10 years it feels like most game developers forgot about that second step of optimizing within the hardware bounds, instead just waiting for new hardware to bring improvements.

If there's any sort of silver lining on the AI hardware kerfuffle, now there's no real promise of big hardware refreshes just on the horizon, so who knows, maybe we're entering a golden era of software optimizations.