I still play AAA games, but I definitely recognize some of the issues mentioned here. I'd also like to mention pet peeve, which is that a lot of AAA games these days feel like collections of clearly distinct features that interact with each other in clearly defined ways (if at all) instead of coherent wholes. I'm not sure it's any different from how things have always been (well, it probably is), but it certainly feels like an aspect that's lagging behind other developments in games.

AAA peaked on 360/PS3, when budgets were still reasonable enough that you got really bold, creative stuff like Bioshock or Bayonetta or Enslaved.

Eh, you can't really say that all AAA is bad as a blanket statement. I guess you could say that overall, the situation is not as good as it has been in the past.
Still, I take everything on a game by game basis, like I have always done.
Smaller indies just don't do it for me, I need a bigger scope and production value.
All in all, there's a lot to pick from, so there's always something decent going on.

I seriously miss stuff like that. I remember doing silly stuff in Half-Life all the time, killing the scientists in funny ways and whatnot. I also remember a good laugh or two from Morrowind when messing around with important characters. You had all the freedom you wanted. Nowadays it feels like you're just rushing from one cutscene to the next with the gameplay in between perfectly planned out. There are a lot of times in modern games where I ask myself why they just didn't make a movie. 

So yeah, I totally get where you're coming from and I almost stopped playing AAA games completely myself. There are one or two titles each year that I enjoy. But for most of the big releases I simply do not care. Which is excluding Nintendo stuff, obviously. =P

I still play them, but more sparingly. The biggest obstacle for me is the time investment. So many big AAA single-player titles are massive time sinks these days. I can pick up and play many an old NES, SNES, or Genesis game and beat it in less than two hours. It's easy to go back and play those games because they ask so little of my time. Meanwhile, games today can take 20, 40, or even 60+ hours to beat. The scale and scope of video games has grown substantially. If you can only play a couple of hours a day you might be working on that one game for weeks worth of play sessions. And so much of that time is often busy work, particularly in open-world games where the map is populated by a bunch of repetitive checklist objectives.

Depends on the meaning of “AAA” games.

I tend to see “AAA” more as a development philosophy rather than a type of game. There was kind of an industry around building a trunk and continuously branching off of it with new content every year or two. Sports games, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty. That’s how I’d look at it. Like the factory produced blockbuster franchise film industry… except for video games.

But I think beyond that definition it gets too broad for AAA to really mean anything.
Much like blockbusters, if you veer off definitions more related to Bond, Star Wars, and Marvel, and into more unique films like 2001, Interstellar, Bladerunner, Silence of the Lambs, and Children of Men, then I’d say those are a different sort of thing. Games like Skies of Arcadia and Cyberpunk fit here.

Or even franchise games that stray far from the establishment kind of feel like something else, I mean technically Blockbuster/AAA, but almost like an exception to the mass production rule: think of franchise films that are unique inside the franchise - Logan, Rogue One, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - Games that fit like that are Breath of the Wild, Witcher 3, and Xenoblade Chronicles X. These more unique franchise games used to be much more common in the SNES/PSX era.

There are even some franchise films I like which are somewhat similar to the core First Class, Aliens, and T2. For games, I liked the original DKC trilogy and Assassin’s Creed 2. More recently, Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

Brother, I have over 100 PS2 games on PCSX2 and 500GB worth I been playing last week or two and been having a blast. I don't have a single modern game lined up for pre order. For the first time in years. I do have a collection of physical PS2 games as well but if not wanting to spend the cash on old games. This is great.