The number of critically acclaimed games remains the same though. So for now we're getting quantity, but not the quality.

What if the number of game critics just hasn’t increased, and since they can only play/review a fixed number of games each year due to time constraints, the number that they acclaim each year hasn’t grown? Not saying this is necessarily the case, just suggesting the possibility.

source?

Has the amount of 95%+ reviews games-released increased though? And how much of that is due to the pandemic? Its anecdotal, but the game-dev discord I'm in has had a decent reduction in # of regulars since the tail end of the pandemic 24-25. And ironically, I was one of them until recently. I think people actually just had more time.

95 is a pretty random cutoff. But you can see for yourself the number of 65%, 75%,85%,90% positively reviewed games has increased similarly: https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/?refinementList%5Btags%5D...