I don't think we're going to see a crash, but a correction is definitely in order. Companies producing AAA games have been doing design by committee for a few years now, trying to distill its essence into a factory line product the same way movie studios give us the same Joseph Campbell plot in different skin over and over.
Still, you're probably right about the golden era and the difficulty of discovery. It's a shame game journalism is so corrupt.
I'm not sure what corruption in games journalism has to do with any of it. For example, the old Nintendo Power magazine was as theoretically corrupt as it is possible to be, being a propaganda rag owned by the video game company itself. And yet each issue featured tons of games that I'd have never heard of otherwise; its capacity for discovery was great.
The problem is games are so expensive and there are so many of them you can't try them all, so it's not enough to know a game exists - you need some indication it's worth buying. That's the purpose of a review, and if you can't trust the reviewer to be reasonably unbiased it's of no value.
Still, you're probably right about the golden era and the difficulty of discovery. It's a shame game journalism is so corrupt.