I’m not arguing in favor of companies putting out shoddy gamesor the practice of games needing patches to fix glaring issues, but suggesting that the 90s and early 2000s were the days of totally flawless games seems like a result of survivorship bias.
We remember the great games from those days, but there were mountains of shovelware games releasing with all the problems we see today.
Even many good or great games from those days have problems that either remain unfixed, or have only been fixed years later by fans.