Calling the first game low effort is being ignorant or disingenuous. The first Resident Evil was iterating directly from Alone in The Dark, and more directly, Sweet Home on the NES. I do understand in hindsight why people dislike Resident Evil, since it marketed itself as THE WORLD OF SURVIVOR HORROR and I feel like a lot of the trailers made the games look more action packed then they really are. When in reality, the tank control resident evil games are just one big puzzle with zombies much more focused on exploration and solving smaller puzzles inside the big puzzle of the mansion in RE1, or the police station in RE2, etc.
I said in a previous post I didn't grow up with consoles and have always been PC only. And as someone who grew up loving point and click adventure games, when I realized that's what the OG Resident Evil games are, that really clicked and worked for me. But I can't see why it didn't for some people. But acting like it was low effort or not thought out at all is just retarded.