For example, both Final Fantasy XVI & STALKER 2 take up 152GB & 165GB on my 2TB external SSD. I mean, why are steam games HUGE as f*ck regarding their file sizes lately? Don’t even mention CoD (200GB?!), even with the fastest internet connection: you can’t bypass patience as these things take up time. For me, it took me about 2 days to finish (pause & resume download). I’ve finished installing KCD II (Royal Edition) and that was 85GB (took up 8-12 hours with fast internet, I was binge watching a TV show on Prime Video the entire time).
That is definitely part of it, but there’s also just plain more textures and models because people complain if they see the same texture or models reused a lot, or the textures look too grainy when they are right up next to one. An uncompressed 256x256 RGBA texture takes 256 kilobytes to store. A 4k version takes 16 megabytes.