Has this ever been the case? For as long as I’ve been playing games (early 1990s), there have always been buggy games that were clearly not thoroughly playtested. The difference was that back then, patches were either impossible (console - at best there was a silently patched re-release later*) or required PC players to purchase a gaming magazine to get them (if there were any). Perhaps the fact that it’s now easy to distribute even large patches has incentivized developers to adopt a “we’ll fix it eventually” approach, but I have no actual data on this resulting in worse games on average. If there is an actual measurable decrease in software quality in the gaming world, it could just be that the increasing technical complexity of games makes it impossible to detect the majority of bugs these days.

*GTA San Andreas is one of the better known examples of this. There were game-breaking bugs in the original PS2 release that made 100% completion impossible. Only later releases (and ports) had these issues fixed.

Until they aren’t being offered anymore. On PC, physical games are practically dead and on console, they are only making up less than 20% of sales at this point (which is why both Sony and Microsoft are offering versions of the consoles without disc drives). Not to mention, there’s often mandatory day-one patches in the tens of gigabytes or (particularly on Switch and Switch 2) the physical media only containing some of the game files, requiring a download to play.