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I think the question of authenticity is very simple to answer. The media I was exposed to in my formative teen years was obviously very authentic and deep. Anything produced since I have turned into a cynical adult is shallow consumerist drivel.
For real, I think that there are differences in authenticity. Take video games. On the one end of the spectrum you have games like nethack or dwarf fortress, where the motivation to build the game was clearly not not get rich. On the other hand of the spectrum, you have EA ${sport_franchise} ${current_year}. Perhaps there are devs in the world whose dream job is it to publish the same soccer game every year for a decade, each time with slightly better graphics and the current (licensed) roster, and they would totally do it as a hobby (if it was not for the license fees). But it seems more likely that EA has found that enough people will spend 50 Euros (or whatever) on the latest soccer game every year and are determined to milk that cash cow for the rest of time, and the devs of FIFA are only slightly more enthusiastic about their products than the devs of SAP.
Most games fall somewhere in the middle, with the devs seeing it as a dayjob which (hopefully) pays the bills while also being more fun than writing enterprise Java.
Likewise, there is value in originality. Stardew Valley is a competently written game of its genre, but that is not its claim to fame. It's claim to fame is that it basically invented the genre.
These two measures of authenticity are of course correlated. Large gaming studios are mostly risk-averse, and the bigger the title the less risk people are willing to take. If Stardew Valley had flopped in beta, ConcernedApe would have had to find a different way to make a living. If an AAA title tanks, quite a few people (some of them with decent paychecks) might lose their job. So of course the big studios imitate the indie devs who made it big, better a 80% chance at making a decent game than a 20% chance at making a groundbreaking game.
Stardew Valley did not invent a genre. Most of its mechanics are from the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series, which started in 1996.
And even if you want to distinguish Stardew Valley from Harvest Moon by SV's combat in the mines, Rune Factory had added it into the series by 2007.
It's actually kinda interesting to think about why it worked so well. It's an improvement in nearly every way from the A-gamer productions, even the ones that avoided handheld hell, but I dunno which one I'd point to as to what actually mattered in sales.
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