You're right that it would take budget and time of course, but it doesn't seem like a huge amount of work for most dev studios compared to making their game more accessible to a wider audience? I feel like there's some marketing thing of "our game is so awesome it takes 1000GB of disk space!" going on, which is really stupid, but it's probably working sadly!

You're not quite right about 20 years ago, though - I was a gamer 20 years ago (yes, your comment did make me feel old) and disk space wasn't really something people complained about, at least with respect to games. Even Sims 2 with all it's 18 expansions only took up around 10GB or so, whereas most games were 5GB or less, they had to be otherwise you couldn't fit them on a DVD. Most gamers had at least 100GB+ hard drives, 200GB+ was more common. Starfield requires 130GB of disk space, and according to the Steam Hardware Survey, at least 18% of gamers don't have that much to spare, and significantly fewer aren't going to have that to spare on an SSD and will suffer the indignity of slow load times :)