I don't know if that's a concession so much as an evolved understanding of what is fun in an adventure game.
Pixel hunting and moon logic puzzles where you're more or less expected to brute force the puzzle and groan at the answer (e.g. the infamous monkey wrench); that shit was never fun. It ended up in games because the genre was still immature and game designers didn't know better.
Modern adventure games are much better at ensuring that the key is never far from the lock... for the simple reason that softlocking because you didn't pick up a single pixel that was an important rock 4 hours ago isn't fun, and neither is backtracking across the entire game to talk to the pigeon you missed because it only briefly flies past in the background once every 4 minutes.
Pixel hunting and moon logic puzzles where you're more or less expected to brute force the puzzle and groan at the answer (e.g. the infamous monkey wrench); that shit was never fun. It ended up in games because the genre was still immature and game designers didn't know better.
Modern adventure games are much better at ensuring that the key is never far from the lock... for the simple reason that softlocking because you didn't pick up a single pixel that was an important rock 4 hours ago isn't fun, and neither is backtracking across the entire game to talk to the pigeon you missed because it only briefly flies past in the background once every 4 minutes.