One of the Transformers sequels (I think Revenge of the Fallen) was written around the time of the writer's strike and when it made a significant profit execs realized that they don't need to hire actual writers for movies, we saw what happened next.
There were already movies that were stupid as shit prior to the writer's strike, but the writer's strike only made things that much worse.
Then the generation that grew up under that idiotic cultural climate grew up and went to college and got brainwashed by Marxism and now we have the nightmare we live in today.
You can trace modern Clown World all the way back to the 1990s sadly, it's just a matter of degrees, but American culture started getting real dumbed down a long time ago and that eventually blossomed into Woke, which is what you get when you combine Jerry Springer style idiocy with good old fashioned hardcore Marxism, it's perfectly horrible.
As for Abrams, I can't tell what he made that made him and Bad Robot get so much clout in Hollywood but it should never have been made. The man and his company are responsible for the biggest hollywood dumpsterfires in recent memory and they keep getting away with it. After burning down Star Trek and Star Wars Bad Robot is in the process of torching LotR with two litereally who showrunners who Abrams probably got in the door just to see if he could get away with it.
It was Lost, it's hilarious that you don't even remember Abrams was one of the guys that gave us Lost because Lost is so forgotten now, but at the time it was a bonafide cultural phenomenon that had whole conventions dedicated just to it and some people even compared it to Star Wars, which is especially funny in hindsight.
Abrams really seemed like a guy who had his pulse on the culture, I really enjoyed the 2009 Star Trek movie, it felt fresh, exciting, Abrams really did seem like a new golden boy, I don't know what went wrong, maybe he just cracked under the pressure, but all his potential was wasted.
Anyway, for me that's The Last of Us. I watched an LP of it and while I think it's a good game, devs learned all the wrong lessons from it and tried to make all their games more "cinematic". And for a time they tried to ape the father/child dynamic in their games as well as have a bunch of sections where you aren't allowed to move faster than walking speed and having to listen to characters yammer on and on. Then the DLC came out and made Ellie, who at this point was barely a teenager have a gay relationship with another girl which I think help influenced the woke and pedophilic shit we see a lot of nowadays.
I loved The Last of Us 1, I don't think the issue is devs taking the wrong lessons from it's mechanics, I think the issue is just that things went Woke.
Last of Us 1 is very non-Woke, black characters are introduced
only to soon be killed off, the strong black woman character is ultimately revealed to be a villain and our white male protagonist coldly shoots her in the face, said white male protagonist has to protect the young female character from harm (though she is shown to be capable of taking care of herself as well)
It's no wonder the first thing on the agenda for the sequel was to kill that white male character off, but I remember playing the DLC in 2014 and I still remember that kind of sinking feeling in my gut when it reveals Ellie is gay, same feeling I had when playing Gone Home in 2013, I just pretty much knew that was the start of something not good for video games.
