Better hardware make gamedevs more lazy, remember when they managed to squeeze a game with 3d+music into a CD? (Lego island) now 100+GB for a below average and unfinished game, back then if you have mid even low end PC you can still enjoy most if not all the games (1990-2009) ever released now devs just know everyone have high end PC to play their 10 minutes games before you got board and play solitaire instead
Tho shit has changed since then. The quality of audio and video has increased. Especially on the visual side this takes a lot more storage. More polygons and more pixels equal larger size.
Also, if I remember correctly, data is often stored in multiple places to make it more efficient to read it from BluRay or HDDs.
Tho, with SSDs now in everything, the second thing will probably die out.
remember when they managed to squeeze a game with 3d+music into a CD? (Lego island)
Back then a CD had about as much storage as your entire hard drive. Also, lego island isn't really a AAA game. A AAA game from 1997 would be something like final fantasy 7, which came on two whole CDs. Drive capacity hit a boom around the 2000s and 2010s, and only recently have AAA games been catching up.
People always want to blame this shit on game developers being lazy, and they're not wrong that a lot of AAA games are bug ridden messes designed to please shareholders. But games are getting more and more complex, and these developers are being forced to work under strict time constraints.
That doesn't mean there isn't room to improve. Maybe offering different download options depending on your storage needs should become a common practice (iirc some games used to do that back when internet bandwidth was limited).