Maybe late to the game (no pun! :)) but ok.
I must say that my last console was a PS3, then I played on steam 2 or 3 times a year, now I was lend a PS4 by a friend cause I wanted to try some exclusivity but is it normal to install 20-30GB even when you own physical game ?
It was already a thing annoying back in the day on PS3 for some game (GTA 5 being the worst as far as remember) but here, it is getting ridiculous and seems to be default behavior for most games.
On PC, which is mostly dematerialized, why not, at least, you can use your computer in during the time but I don’t expect that from a console.
Can we meaningfully say that performance has improved over time when games are getting more graphically intensive and wasting all that potential? I would say a Nintendo DS running Tetris has more performance than a PS5 running that new Bethesda game
Yes, we can. Gamers and computer nerds have been measuring performance for decades. For example, see https://www.userbenchmark.com and https://www.digitalfoundry.net.
You could develop a benchmark around the DS version of Tetris, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem like a useful benchmark to me.
The rest of your question seems to be a value judgement that graphically intensive games are “wasting all that potential”. Kind of ironic considering you appear to be asking for objective ways to measure performance.
That’s a pretty high caliber shot to miss the point with