I get where you're coming from, but I very much disagree with this. It's like saying modern cars with safety features are a liability to road safety as it removes the incentive to have better trained drivers that pay attention to the road. One does not necessary mean the exclusion of the other.

HW advancements give more creative freedom to game designers and can let the studios focus more resources on the look and feel of the game rather than wrestling with technical limitations like in the old days when even 2D side scrolling games on PCs, like Commander Keen, represented a technical challenge and needed the incredible mind of John Carmack to pull off.

The vast, open, complex, high fidelity worlds we enjoy in famous titles today only exist because consumer HW has advanced enough at a palpable price point (barring the post-2020 scalpocalipse) to support the vision of the designers. Games with such details would have not been economically feasible on consumer HW in the distant pass even if you had to code them in raw assembly from scratch.

So IMHO it was good thing when every now and then a new game like Far Cry or Crysys would come along and break the mold by exceeding what the current gen mainstream HW was capable of, showing what the near future could look like when HW gets a bit faster and more affordable. But those days of the rebel engine designers that would leave everyone drooling in awe with visuals that only delivered on $3000+ PC HW are pretty much behind us now, as every studio is designing games to work on the lowest common denominator (consoles and phones) as that's where the majority of users and $$$ is.

And one can say, "Well, what was the point of making games that looked amazing on HW nobody could afford at the time?" but the same could be said "Well, what was the point of going to the moon when nobody can afford to go there?". Innovation needs disruptors to break the mold and push boundaries for the benefit of the knowledge gained in the process, as it will trickle down later with time.