In general you're right. The puzzle aspect in many big name games seems to have disappeared. Some games still have them but they feel diluted compared to the games of the last gens. Even the last Tomb Raider only had them in a diluted form, as did the Uncharted games.

I think only the Portal games were really puzzle. Other than that, Half-Life 2 episodes had a few and the dungeons in Skyrim could sometimes force me to rethink.

Puzzles in games usually suck, so I'm glad they're becoming less common. Exploration's in the same boat. I'd rather have a few great puzzle/exploration games than a bunch of mediocre ones. Hopefully my game can be one of the great ones lol.

With gaming moving towards more cinematic presentation developers don't want to have something in the game that that halts the pacing for too long.

I agres with you this is the way developers are going, but I think this isn't the way they should be going. Games are a form of media, therefore they have their own language. The same way cinema shouldn't be the filmed theatre, the games shouldn't be the interactive cinema, because they can be much more. Back in the 2d era people had to have imagination and create fun gameplay to keep gamers hooked, now with the development of the technology instead of evolving their own language and logic games are even more just borrowing the cinema language. Sorry Kojima, but metal gear cutscenes are not funny. I'd like to see a game that have "in-game play cutscenes that aren't  QTE". Exploration was a form to bring that...

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If you want your games to sell better, you have to remove any part of the game where people could get lost or stuck.