I don't know if you actually grew up at that time because there were was even more crap than today. Making games didn't cost that much so pretty much anystudio could publish one and since there was no Internet, we used to pay a lot of money for shitty games. And there was no diffrence between cheap and AAA games, they had the same price tag.
Now, you don't like most of today's AAA games, that a choice altough a lot of them are pretty good, does that mean that you have to make a game shitty for it to be god? Or isn't it that using PS1 graphics as an identity is just convenient for hiding that you are bad at 3d modeling?