i fully agree with your statement and with many replies here.
i can't believe how did this franchise downgrade so much. though, this is not exclusive from ea, many things i loved as a kid are getting the worst reboots ever, with braindead plot, dumb humor and silly looking characters. it's like a trend.
but going back to the sims, it really upsets me how expensive the whole game is, how glorified it is by its own creators and how ea started marketing the game as "representation & safe space" to derail the bad attention the game is getting to get media's approval.
i don't like to blame the devs for the game decisions but seeing the whole panorama there's no one else to blame, they are ruining the franchise and it's unfair because it's not theirs. if they wanted to experiment with their own ideas they should've gone with another title, see if it could have been successful, but they are just profiting the sims brand to get sales. the sims 4 should've ended a long time ago, especially knowing how flawed is the coding, but of course they gonna milk it till the end even with content no one asked for, because many players will buy anything about ea and defend anything about ea no matter what.