There are many Examples I can think of here, many JRPG's (Metaphor Refantazio's insane length padding) and Western open world (Assassin's Creed Vallhalla with mediocre bloat 700+ collectibles) and so many others. And another question, do you have any games you can list that would be improved by being shorter?

My thoughts:

Metaphor Refantazio, FF Remake, Rebirth, Tales of Arise, Lies of P, Hogwarts Legacy, Red Dead Redemtion 2, God Of war Ragnarok and even Ghost Of Tsushima are examples of relatively recent enough games that would be greatly improved were they shorter experiences with some of the fat cut off. 

FF remake and Rebirth. They intentionally put you in set back situations, like falling into a ravine and spending a half hour to escape for no other reason than to extend length and they do it often, to a lesser degree having you get trapped and put into a panic room like scenario to escape or both, falling into a trap and this does not feel like meaningful progression, why not just add in foward progression in place of this... why is this the best you can come up with for content. It's a shitty way to pad for length. Rebirth could be said to be bloated but it escapes that cause it's so fun, the issue is the ammount of content you have to learn new sets of mechanics for with no common design language between some of the mini games. And then there is the issue of slowing you down by having to slowly climb a ladder every five feet or having to move into a slowed down narrow paths and even further it slows your character right down for periods of time during dialogue. Every little things seems to be to slow you down in Remake, Rebirth fixes much of that until the end where it picks it up again. And like all JRPG's it doesn't know when to end or how to make an ending without drawing it out and knowing what fat to cut. 

I find this game to be the worst of padding for length and bloating for scope at the same time. This and Meaphor have prompted me to now check how a games pace is handled from let's play videos before I buy, likely this will get me spoiled but it's worth not having my time wasted in such frustrating ways. Reviewers need to have a section alongside the big aspects like Music, combate etc where it mentions the games pacing and how it respects your time or not, and call these devs out. 

Bump. I wanna hear thoughts on this and if people actually notice that this is happening and becoming more common as the years go by with new tricky little ways to slow down player progression and hit higher play hpurs, like Diablo 4's loot stash size and having to dump every other dungeon. GaaS like grind is making it's way into single player games, surely people must have thoughts on this...

You named the 2 types of games I don't play often lol. I played FF7 Remake and I could feel how much bloat there was, and it took me at least a month to finish it. Certainly had its highs, but its lows were really felt. Idk when I'll ever bother with Rebirth. Maybe on a super cheap third party store PC discount lol. Same thing goes with Atlus games. I just can't get into Persona because of how long that game takes.

I definitely don't play Ubisoft games anymore. If I'm going to play an open world game that I know is going to take me upwards of 100 hours, then it has to be a game that stands out from the rest rather than having a typical western open world checklist. Stalker 2 definitely has scratched that type of itch. Been playing it practically every time I get to game. Next game that I can see soaking up my time like that would be Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. After that, probably Fable.

Well I guess I'll say yes. An example that comes to mind is Fire Emblem Three Houses versus Fire Emblem Engage. Both have a hub world between missions. The monastery in 3H is ginormously big and full of side stuff that adds little substance. Engage also has a hub world called Somniel which is full of side stuff that adds little substance, but it is significantly smaller. And that is a good thing in my eyes. I don't enjoy running around the same paths all along between each and every mission in order to look for some characters that randomly roam around and want to have a chat with me. The monastery is nothing but a big waste of time. Earlier games in the series had the same chats, but they are in a menu. Simple as that. But wait, I hear you say, you can access these side things through menus as well in 3H. While it is true that there is a menu which shows what kind of side stuff can be done and where, as far as I remember, you would still need to teleport into that certain area where that certain character hangs around, walk up to and talk to him. Correct me if I'm wrong. The monastery may be cool at first but it got so tiresome after so many hours.

I want games to focus on what they are supposed to deliver.

Some games certainly have more bloat than they should have but I find the poll option "not like they used to" pretty funny because old school definitely did not respect your time with stuff like full game overs, tons of trial and error design and RPGs having much more forced grinding.

Exactly. Older games didn't respect your time either but in a different fashion.

Now, as for newer games, there's an all too common sentiment that shorter games aren't worth a higher price tag (even if it's just the absence of bloat!) and you see it even among 'enthusiast' circles, so I wouldn't hold my breath to see that change anytime soon. Bloat is cheaper to develop too, so yeah.

Longer/shorter. It just depends on the content. I expect an open-world game to be longer than a linear action game. The issue is bloat. Do they fill that open world with plenty of meaningful content or a bunch of checklists of 800 things to collect with icon vomit? Dragon Quest games are long, but they're quality. The same goes for Xenoblade, Persona, and such. Spider-Man 2 just had Ubisoft bloat. Spider-Man 1 was worse. While I still enjoyed them. I hit a point I just wanted it to be over. I do feel a lot of games these days overstay their welcome. More often than not these days I hit a point where I skip all side stuff and even some story stuff because it has gone on so long I want it to be over. Hello FF16/LaD IW.

My thought-process is very simple: If the game takes longer than 50hr to 100% complete, then I will not play it unless it has recieved extreme critical acclaim and/or has powerful word-of-mouth.

I am fine devouting hundreds of hours to Elden Ring, Zelda BotW/TotK, and Super Mario Odyssey. I might be okay doing this for Persona 5 and Metaphor. I would not do this for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and my conclusion is very clear: no, devs don't respect our time even nearly enough. I don't mind long games either, but when it's Assassin's Creed: Valhalla with mostly similar content you feel like you've already seen too much of by the time you've played through half the game, you know the devs just don't respect your time at all. That's the worst offender I've personally played, but sadly disrespecting player time is way too common these days. Way too often it's all about addicting the player and adding filler content so you can brag about how much content your game has, and way too rarely it's a suitably designed playthrough with lots of optional content for those that want it (or just skipping the extra content altogether, if not enough people care about it).

40-50 hours already feels like a lot, and anything more than that just for a typical playthough (including side content typical to a regular playthrough) is generally just way too much. If anything, 'content' for more than 50 hours of gameplay is probably often poor design. If it's actual gameplay that doesn't get old even after 50 hours despite going through the same content a lot, that's good design, at least in some ways, but 50+ hours of 'unique' content most likely isn't, at least based on my limited experience.

tl;dr: No, devs don't respect our time, and I'm fed up with it.

It's funny how mostly you'll get either what you described, or you get a barebones amount of content and get everything drip fed to you while also charging absurd prices on mtx. There's very rarely an in-between.