Naughty Dog's problem is that they wasted years and tens of millions of dollars on a failed gaashit. Not that their production values are too high. TLOU2 was a $200M+ game. It was top tier in basically everything at the time it came out in terms of production values, and there is no reason to think ND would have said, "ok that's cool, no need to push this stuff we pushed for this game further next time, we're good".. That's just not the way this works.