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Two things.
It's not just video game writing. Writing across the board has utterly fallen apart. Characters lack any sort or purpose or core motivation, and mostly just get shuffled to the next artificial point of conflict/drama. Plots make almost no sense, even on their own terms, with characters acting in wildly unbelievable ways to force it along. Or the plot just regularly breaks the rules or themes of the work because it doesn't know what else to do. And that's not even touching on the fact that literally the only themes worked into anything these days is weird demoralization propaganda focused entirely on privilege/oppression dynamics, often in strictly black and white moralistic terms. Zero awareness of the human condition.
In so far as video game writing was "good", it was good in the sense that it was load bearing. The dialog could be awkward, the prose could be stilted, but if it supported the world that was being built and created the illusion that the game was a more lived in, real place than was possible to actually create or depict given technical, financial or design constraints, people generally say it was "good". I rarely find this to be the case anymore, as weird current year political bullshit immediately collapses the writing under the load a fictional world places upon it.
I do sometimes try to entertain the arguments of people who claim nothing has changed. That video games always had out of place "current year" pop culture references. Or that they were already political. And I know examples abound. I recall reading about one particular Infocom game that was written out of pure spite for Reagan winning a second term.
All the same, what felt like rare exceptions has become the norm, to the point where it crowds everything else out. It hasn't quite reached the level in games that it has on Netflix, where probably half the dialog is weird current year political references and marxist bullshit, and 3/4 of the characters are nonsensically and almost impossibly diverse for the setting. Which is to say, sometimes you encounter a purely ludic game with almost no writing what so ever. But among any game I've seen that has any appreciable amount of writing to speak of, if it's western, or even if activist got ahead of the translating duties, it's all sorts of shit up with current year nonsense.
Great game writing is often inseparable from great worldbuilding. If you look at something like Roadwarden, a simple RenPy illustrated text RPG, the game is its writing. It lives and dies on the strength of its worldbuilding so it has to pull that off, or else fail completely.
When the writing is bad though, I find it's less a failure of worldbuilding, or even current year bullshit, but more because of what must be intentional blandness. You don't get Starfield NPCs without trying to be that boring.
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I think this expands on the cultural issue that I mentioned. I think there is some severe form of cultural myopia, with an additional dash of political activism that is all-but-mandatory in large creative industries, that has made writing fall apart. I will admit to avoiding talking about the political angle, due to the fact that I find it so emotionally charged that it's hard for me to actually detail what specifically is the problem without feeling like I'm just inserting comments to justify my own beliefs. That said, it is very real. One of the writers I brought up in my post had started violently talking about those critical of COVID measures. He fell in line with the specific blue tribe bias that's in the video game industry despite the fact that he'd been out of it for over 20 years at that point. This indicates that it goes beyond simply "the industry".
I've often lamented that the internet has made everyone sound the same, everywhere. The same references, patterns of speech, opinions - it feels like a Dead Internet even if I know for a fact I'm interacting with real people. Sometimes I'm interacting with people in real life and hear exact patterns of speech I've seen on left-leaning reddit communities.
My point in bringing that up is that seeing this writer whom I really respect fall into such a thought-terminating cliche (I believe he said "Just get the fucking vax") made me wonder how many potentially brilliant writers are out there right now, unknowingly stunted by the political climate and their obedience to it. Given someone who predated the time of mandatory political views for creative work failed to avoid that pitfall, how could someone raised in it fare better? How many various ways of thinking have been culled and brought into line by the mandatory participation in the culture war modern society has cultivated? And how many completely untalented writers have been propelled into prominence by adherence to the "correct" politics? The answer to both those questions is definitely over zero, and even at that level I think that's a disaster. I genuinely fear we're heading for a dark age creatively. My only hope is that it's looked back on as a very brief period of time.
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