Bit of a yapfest below. There will be no TL;DR because ya’ll desperately need long-form analysis these days.
Art as a whole today is in a place where it’s predominantly being produced by non-artists. You have big studios behind most of this stuff, and their primary objective isn’t to innovate—because innovation is risky and could result in lost profits—they instead only ever take the safest possible routes in design, which is always something that’s been done before. It’s hard to know for sure if something new will be engaging enough to sell. All you have to go on are playtests and guesswork. It’s much, much easier to know if something old which previously sold well will sell well again, because if you replicate it, chances are the original audience will at least look at your product.
Unfortunately, even smaller creators have been sucked up in this unoriginal trend, keeping to old tried-and-true objects in their art at the expense of innovation. I think part of the reason for them doing so is because video games are no longer a new, novel medium where everyone has to invent their own wheel—instead, we have mechanics, art styles, design choices, and themes which have all shown themselves to work. But while big-name creators go with these aspects to maximize profits, I think smaller creators do so thoughtlessly. They just see such things as an industry standard, and add it in almost automatically.
As an example, look at parrying in action games. This mechanic has been done to death, and it started (at least in the mainstream) with Sekerio: Shadows Die Twice, where it was one of the core mechanics which the entire combat revolved around. Nowadays, though, you have games like Arcane Odyssey which has it as a nothingburger non-dedicated defense option which you use if you happen to be able to react in time. It was added simply because Vetex probably thought “oh, most action games of this genre have a parry button, let’s add that”.
To be clear, I’m not saying that parrying is necessarily bad for AO—with how unreliable dodging is with everything’s ridiculous attack size and the truly horrific desync, it’s probably for the better that parrying exists. I am simply stating that there was probably no big consideration by Vetex where he asked himself “alright, should I add parrying in the game? And, if I do should I go about adding it in a different way than how everyone else has done so?” No, it was likely no more of an idea than “alright, assign block and parry to G, easy enough, next addition—fishing! Because every game needs a waiting-based system in it!”