Clearly, high effort prerendered / drawn cutscenes are, well: high effort.
Mario, as you said the story is not important, so it is fine for them to tell the story like that; just as long as they do the focused content well.
BotW, I was disappointed in, in terms of the cutscenes, but they do make up less than 1% of the game, so it is not too bad.
Doing the cutscenes in real time would of further increased my immersion.
However the scenes were kind of like a cutscene for Link too, so I guess it is just me being picky.

The worst offenders are the developers who use in-game assets, and don't even offer any real visual advantage, oh and lock it to 30FPS and whatever the hot resolution was at the time.

Fully in-engine real time scenes help the game age, especially on PC and when emulators are used.

Mario is a AAA game, i would say it is the most AAA Nintendo game.

Snake Pass?  Let me look that up ...

Wow.  Yeah, you're right, it does indeed seem that Nintendo's new Mario title is going to be more polished than Sumo Digital's self-published game.

Jesus Christ!!! More than a 1/4 of an regular 500 GB's storage is taken up by this fairly unimpressive game that is completely linear with the way you complete objectives along with having no multiplayer. When GTA 5 and MGS 5 take up 60 GB and 25 GB respectively... it's kind of embarrasing for your smaller scale game to eat up that storage.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=19853

Doesn't look like it has enough content to warrant that file size. Could the live action segments have something to do with this?

Yeah.  The game itself is 45GB.  The rest is video but supposedly you can stream them instead of downloading them.  https://gearburn.com/2016/03/quantum-break-xbox-one-episode-size/

I guess that's more understandable. Still... this much content does not warrant 45 GB. It warrants around 20 or less.

I find in engine cutscenes rather boring, something to skip or speed up. If there has to be a cutscene then make something that's worth watching again. Cut scenes used to feel like a reward, a glimpse into the future of game graphics or over the top action that the game engine would never be able to pull off, usually triggered after reaching a milestone.

Nowadays most cutscenes feel more like a punishment, mostly used for mission briefing. Do I skip it and risk maybe missing some important information or sit through it being bored. The lazy in game cutscenes with a few characters talking are the worst. If all it is talking, then let me move around at least / have the option to walk away, fill me in on the road. GTA5 had terrible forgettable cutscenes, I skipped most of them.

As long as the developer keeps all the assets, in-engine cutscenes can be remastered as well. As for emulators, too bad. I still have great memories of the amazing cutscenes in FF7, I can't recall any memorable in-engine cutscenes.

Perhaps it's also a fault of diminishing returns, next to file size. Ni No Kuni is the last game that had memorable cut-scenes to me, exactly because they stood out with some real effort put in. If it all looks the same it just feels like a non interactive part of the game, which is worse imo. Perhaps it's time to retire the old fashioned cutscene completely as it for sure doesn't work in VR. It's time to go back to HL2's way of storytelling.

I think we are on the same page now.
For me it goes in this order:

1. Design you game so you don't need cutscenes: Portal, Halflife 2.
2. Either put in the effort and make the cutscenes outstanding like Ni No Kuni or Payday 2.
3. Do all your cinematics in engine like Metal Gear.

I remember the install sizes for some of my PS4 games also going 70+ GB and on PC some games are just... wow xD

luckely I have enough storage, but good compression is MUCH more important for the switch because games should fit on the cardridges to prevent disasters

In the end it's mostly all about high res textures and the ammount of textures. Sound and sound formats multiple languages take huge amounts of space. And the cutscenes and considering Mario Oddesey doesn't have an overwhelming amount of cuts cenes and high resolution textures (or many ground textures for that matter) it has a low file size. Same goes for Zelda 13GB and Horizon 40GB. Textures and cutscenes make file sizes big.