This sums up my opinion pretty nicely. 

I disagree, the best era was end of the 90's to early 2000s

Mostly because of the arcades which were fun, I actually just bought recently an arcade with over a thousand games to relieve those golden days.

The era with the dreamcast was the best ever, we had fun games, that were focused on gameplay and fun. Nowadays we have to worry if we even find a console to buy, or big installation times, big downloads and updates and bugs, and gaming is just focused on business, its all turned into a big mcdonalds, corporations charging 70 British pounds for games that used to be 45 pounds before. Games that wont work offline, I cant even restart a career in GT7, imagine that in 98 I could do just that on GT1.

Then there's no more fun of going to you local arcade place with friends and hangout there. And there's no more new stuff, everything is either a sequel, a remake/remaster or a copy of something else, pick any game, horizon forbidden west, assassins creed, resident evil, anything.

Gaming has gotten better graphics and all that, but the joy is half gone. It seems that single player games you only play to pass the story, to finish the game, where in those old days games were played for fun, not to finish them.

Gaming was exciting back then, imagine having something totally new as in metal gear, and resident evil, tomb raider, sonic adventure, pikmin, crazy taxi, shenmue and many more, it seemed that each game was something new, fresh, different and exciting, these days you just feel that you've played these games before.

I overall agree though for the 2nd point I'm mixed on it since patches can encourage releasing something unfinished and can even end up making a game worse which sucks when the earlier version of it is inaccessible. Patches are still overall a good thing but the negatives are unfortunate.

Doom. Cave Story. Duke Nukem. Countless PC games that would spawn into big franchises. Just about every PC game in the 80s was indie and were sold at local shops in ziplock bags with dot matrix printed instructions on a 5 inch floppy.

Interesting, never get to know those games were indies (when originally released)

This isn't true. A few decades ago the cost of making a game was within the ballpark of what a current indie developer could do today (even less, actually). The most famous example of this I think would be Doom. Three guys started up a software company, id Software. Their first game was created by just four people and created in just three months (meaning it likely didn't cost much money). There first few games were published by Apogee Software, but they were never bought out or anything. After a few titles they were able to start self-publishing their own works, starting with Doom (made by five people within nine months). There are many other stories such as this (Insomniac, Epic Games, Bungie, Blizzard, etc)

Basically, back in the 80's and 90's indie development was a significant portion of the market. Very popular developers today were getting their very humble begins as independent developers well into the PS1 era (Valve, Bioware, Treyarch, Gearbox Software, etc). Most of these companies were created by a handful of people with very modest budgets. The definition of "indie" just didn't exist because it didn't need to. Most developers (or at least a large sum of them) were already independent. 

When games became to huge to develop many companies started getting purchased because they just couldn't afford to do otherwise. Eventually the indie label started showing up because most developers were no longer independent. 

Also, I wouldn't be so confident in saying we have so much more variety in the gaming industry. We have more developers than ever, but way less publishers. Embracer group alone owns like 103 studios. It's the publishers that really get control over a product. 

They weren't considered indies. But the team sizes back then were sized what we would call today indie. So if we apply this metric, all games were indies. Not only in the PC area, also console games were made by teams of five or ten people. EA was indie back then. But I wouldn't apply this as metric. The term indie didn't exist back then. Because there were no big ones.

This is kinda pointless, as all game - console or PC - were on a budget and made with a team which is considered indie today. The original Doom was made by 8 people, the original Legend of Zelda by 7 people (if I count right). So following your argument, back then EA, Nintendo, Activision, Sega and so on were all indie devs. Because nothing else existed. In the 90s (at least the first half) not a single game hade credits breaking 100 people or even 50. Probably people in 30 years will say, that Red Dead Redemption 2 was an indie title, because 'only' 1000 people worked on it.

And your publisher argument: it was never that easy to publish stuff as it is today thanks to digital distribution. People have very low hurdles to take, to publish on Steam or itch.io.

We still have the situation, that single devs nowadays can make a proper game because the tools exist and then bring it to the public.

You completely missed the point of what I was saying. Using the definition of what indie means today, the majority of devs were indie up until maybe the PS2 or HD era. The definition for what an indie game was didn't exist because it wasn't necessary. Saying that indie devs didn't exist isn't true, they did. What didn't exist was the definition for an indie developer. Before, it was simply a hobbyist programmer.

As for your RDR2 comment, that's very doubtful. The definition for what an indie game is has been consistent since it's inception. Also, unless you expect the industry to become so costly that games cost multiple billions of dollars to make, that wouldnt happen even if the definition did change. 

Lastly, self-publishing a title is easier on digital storefronts, but finding success through that model is pretty difficult. Attaching yourself to a publisher is still the best way to get noticed by consumers and the best way to receive funding to fully realize your project. So, if you can't do that, you'll either spend years working as a passion project or you will emulate the popularity of another product first to receive notoriety/income. So, again, we run into a similar scenario. Getting a game out there is easier, but getting the game that they have a vision for might be harder (unless your vision is humble, in which case I would cast doubt that it's variety is significantly different than what is on the market already). I'm not saying that all of this makes the amount of variety virtually the same as it was several decades ago, but that the confidence that one has to say it absolutely does have more variety requires greater consideration given the factors above. If I went through every game released in the last year I'd have to weed through a lot more crap to get to the gems, and I'm not entirely confident there would be a huge difference in what those games were offering from the past outside of technical limitations. 

Nah, it's going downhill with MTX and other predatory practices, early access games disguised as live service games sold at full price, and other buggy releases requiring a day one patch on release then another couple months to get the game in shape. Game play is now secondary to monetization in most games, biggest proof of that is GT7. Launch unfinished, patch everything that threatens the MTX model first, broken lobbies and split screen are still waiting for essential fixes 4 months after release. FS2020 has similar issues. Add more content to keep players engaged, which just adds more bugs, long standing essential issues never get fixed (slow down over longer flights, ATC stops working on longer flights, uneven ground at landing due to photogrammetry ground height disparities)

Plus this always online stuff is extremely annoying. Not only does GT7 not work at all without internet, my Series X was rendered useless yesterday with the country wide internet outage. I couldn't play anything, no downloaded games, no disc games, everything needed me to sign into my MS account when trying to go beyond the title screen. I couldn't add a guest account either to get around the issue, just locked out. Go online to set up an offline account... err, I didn't even have a working phone. (Luckily it still worked as a blu-ray player since TV was out as well, and of course Switch and PS4/PS5 still worked fine)

Yesterday have showed me to stick to physical releases and avoid streaming. Heck, I couldn't even get my car serviced yesterday. Needed an oil change, got send back because their computers were down due to the outage. I didn't know oil had to be downloaded :p

The best era for gaming were the 90s and the first two years of PSVR. That made me feel the wonders of the 90s again, experimentation with game play instead of the shiniest visuals.