I had no idea. That sounds like fraud.
Those two somewhat offset and you end up with the classic business decision of whether quality is important.
Tell that to your kid this December, when you gift them a new console and a newly released game. Watch the wonderful experience of it taking forever to download a few gigabytes of patches from overloaded servers, and then not starting anyway because auth/billing/DRM/other bullshit server couldn't handle the demand.
Game studios love releasing around Christmas. I'm surprised they're not being held accountable for ruining that holiday for kids year over year.
I hope industry heads realize that they're actively pushing consumers towards piracy. These days you often get a better experience with a pirated game than a legally bought one: it runs better without DRM and doesn't infect your system, you can play it offline, and no license change will take it away from you. At least GOG seems to be the only store giving you DRM-free and offline installers, but not all games are released on it.
In the US there are still a lot of regions where a 50-100 GB download is just not reasonable.
I know console manufacturers hate retail and the used market, and want that sweet direct income. but it would be a powerful brand move to set higher standards for the physical release. I believe Nintendo has gone this direction.
Back in the day it was a major milestone for video game projects to "go gold". It meant that the rigorous QA process was passed, and that retail copies were ready to be manufactured. Since that involved significant costs and physical logistics, companies certainly didn't want major bugs shipped at this stage. There were some exceptions, but ultimately this led to much higher customer satisfaction. Removing this "inconvenience" for companies and allowing them to ship updates and fixes at any point is a major reason why most modern game releases are a clusterfuck at day one. They treat it as public betas, and day one customers (or, worse, preorder suckers) are testers and a replacement for a QA process they don't have. It's essentially crowdsourced development. This also allows them to hype the game up to boost initial sales, and then go "oops, sorry" while they finish implementing it. This scam has been pulled numerous times over the past decade+, yet these companies keep doing it because it's profitable and there's no legal accountability for it.
The fact these practices are now seeping into software on which human lives depend is criminal, and should be prosecuted and strictly regulated.