I mean, real time mechanics were uncommon when T:AOOT was released and they're uncommon now. But there are examples of them sprinkled throughout the history of gaming -- which was the purpose of showing examples that are spaced out from then until now), including well after the purported decline in youngster competence described in the article. Want more recent examples? Outer Wilds, Twelve Minutes, Forgotten City, Deathloop are all in the last 5 years and all feature the loop version of the time gating mechanic. The Longing is a game that takes place in real time over a one year period and that's been picking up a bit of notice. Consortium is adventure-ish and uses real time.

I'm not saying that these mechanics don't have detractors now, just as they had detractors then. I'm saying there isn't really a generational gap that would make me believe that kids these days wouldn't have a similar reaction to it as people did back then, and the evidence for this is that lots of minor variations of this kind of mechanic exist and mostly it's been in games that do pretty well.

In Hollow Knight, the use of a fan wiki is less about notes in the adventure game sense and more about optimizing builds, reading about lore, checking quest solutions, and looking up boss strategies. It's possible that some unspecified journalist made some unspecified remark about taking notes while playing Elden Ring and some unspecified Twitter demons gave him some unspecified grief about it. And yet, a huge number of people who play Elden Ring do it with a wiki open. Fandom has raised something like $100,000,000 in VC and its primary business model is being a wiki for video games; it's almost entirely supplanted traditional FAQs.

There are of course games that require more traditional "stuff I learned" notes these days, a prime example is The Outer Wilds (> 1 million sales on Steam despite a one year late release, Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, probably my favourite game of the 21st century, Adventure Gamers Game of the Year 2019 so let's sidestep whether you think it's an adventure game please). You might also think about Stardew Valley (20 million+ copies sold, is played almost entirely with Wiki lookups) or Minecraft (300 million copies, has a thriving ecosystem of secondary information and content, including videos, wikis, etc.) What would convince you that there is still a demand for games that require or encourage the use of supplementary information and thinking?

As to team size, point and click adventures don't require the budget of an open world game like Red Dead Redemption 2. About 15 people are credited on Myst. About 20-25 on Secret of Monkey Island. Tons of PnCs today have much larger budgets and larger team sizes than they ever did. The fact that the market also sustains an Asssassin's Creed game made by 2500 people over 3 years doesn't take away from the space for creative adventure games. The relative terms framing is just bonkers. James Cameron has half-billion dollar budget films, but Parasite still exists.

Monkey Island was never a juggernaut. The US sales in the first two years were about 100,000 copies. You don't think Monkey Island could be made today and sell 100,000 copies in the US? Thimbleweed Park (2017, Ron Gilbert) is well over 100,000 copies in the US across platforms. Broken Age is around 100,000 copies on Steam. The Witness over 500k on Steam. Inscryption is over a million on Steam, and that just launched 9 months ago. Papers Please around 2 million on Steam. Agent A, which is I think 3 people in a flash-style animation, is coming up on 100k on Steam. The Grim Fandango re-release is coming on the game's entire original sales run. Phoenix Wright in the 500k range. Gorogoa in the 500k range. The Room around a million units. Granted you can play with the numbers -- lifetime versus first few years sales, discounting, countries of availability, upfront MSRP, availability of console ports versus just PC, whatever. My point isn't to prove all these games outsold Monkey Island, it's to suggest I don't see the apparently cavernous collapsed alleged in demand for PnCs.

It's true that nothing is Myst anymore, but nothing was Myst back then either. PnCs are alive and well.