Is this a slightly revisionist history?
AC unity had a disastrous launch, it barely ran and had endless technical issues to the point where it heavily impacted sales. It looks this good and smooth because it's running on hardware that wasn't released at the time. Ubisoft took a bath on it, lost a shitload of money, and concluded this is not the right way to invest in a game.
It was a cyberpunk situation, the launch was absolute dogshit
As much as everyone in this thread would like games to target hardware that doesn't exist yet, crysis was the same way and got slated on launch. It doesn't result in sales, it's bad business. Toeing the line of high but not so high it breaks but also we don't release for 2 years yet, it's not optimized, so nobody knows what too high even is, is frankly a nightmare. Do you want games you can post in the thread in 5 years, or do you want games you can run at 60fps at launch because they are never the same.