Yeah, these people's answers to art is "Art is getting better because of Moore's Law", and that kind of sentence is not even wrong.
It's also a symptom of a complex of inferiority towards cinema and TV, the high fidelity push with FMV in the 90s and with polygons in the last ten years can be seen as a way to close the gap by people with that inferiority complex or even a push from marketing departments that don't quite understand how videogames work. I wouldn't be surprised if the cinematic fixations of the last 15 years in the triple A environment might be a product of marketing departments who feel comfortable in selling only movie-like experiences and developers who don't consider the new medium a full form of art of its own but rather than something you do when you can't get to hollywood.
And Chris Roberts probably produced the first AAA game with Wing Commander, now it's come full circle, once he had (relatively) limited budgets and publishers keeping him in check, now he is the master of himself and nobody is able to keep him concentrated in making the damn game and he won't be able to stop until people keep buying his JPEGs.
Is that inferiority complex still around? (in general I mean) I feel like most AAA companies have been moving away from purely emulating movies, though I don't pay attention to everything. I've been playing Rise of the Tomb Raider after upgrading my graphics card and while it definitely has its big set piece action sequences, they haven't felt overbearing so far and for me, the highlights of the game are the optional tombs, as with the 2013 game.
It could just be what I've been playing, but outside of some scripted sequences, games have gone back to being happy with being gamey, though some of this I think has to do with open world games being the current trend and it's much harder to make a "cinematic" experience when you've told players they can do whatever they want.
As for Chris Roberts, art often comes from adversity and constraints. I've avoided Star Citizen news after I realized that backing it turned out to be a mistake given their progress and I agree that the ludicrous money he's continued to make hasn't helped get the game significantly closer to its goal. I'm sure there's a positive feedback loop inside CIG that's used to consuming a large amount of money on a regular basis and must get regular injections or bad things will happen.