>Solving the same puzzle twice just feels discouraging.

I'm not so sure about that. Competitive Rubik's exist. Games like Trackmania feature levels that are often "solved" (having a strong world record) for months or years at a time while someone patiently pours hundreds or thousands of hours in to grinding a better time.

Even in emulation, we see figures like byuu(?) who spent years attempting cycle perfect emulation of all games where other emulators were chasing say speed or resource optimization while still other emulators were/are "good enough".

In the pokemon world, plenty of players consider say Emerald to be the final evolution of the game, while others may pick BW, while many are unsatisfied by all until they get a full mmo character designer role-playing game with all gen pokemon and nuzlocke support and custom starters and...There's even a roguelike version.

I think software is ephemeral/artistic enough that both producers and consumers will have different enough taste that there will almost always be some audience for any artist/developer.

We've already been living through this with the proliferation and continual development of easier and easier game engines. When one had to write their own engine, or write code at all, developing a game required either intense passion or intense funding. Even then we got clumsy rush-to-market "America's Got Talent for GBA" games. RPGMaker spawned hundreds or thousands of half-baked nothing-burger "games" and some people's all time favorite games. The same is true of Unreal and others. In each iteration, the prevalence of the old diminishes, but rarely vanishes. People still make MUDs, ren'py, RPGmaker, SNES, PS2, Wii...etc games.

Will this make more more? Sure, but more more has always meant a greater chance of the new latest genuinely greatest bestest game of all time for perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of players. And it's still a tool at the end of the day. The passionate devoted dev team that had your perfect version of a game in their mind(s) is perhaps now able to finish what would have taken them years as a hobby project in a month, with all the bells and whistles dialed in because they truly care. Not everyone will be so committed to brilliant design, but then that's always been the case.

Yes, it is easier than ever to make garbage games; but, it is also easier than ever to make great games.