As does this: there's a sense that we're starting to see the equivalent of planned obsolecence in game design, where a game is expected to last x-number of years after which a new version will come out whether needed or not, all to keep that treadmill going.
Yes 5e was touted as being evergreen, and thus far - to its credit - has at least kept most of its leaves. But the new version still smells of "treadmill".
Anyone who thought 5e was actually going to be "evergreen": I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Your "planned obsolescence" thing suffers from a critical problem:
Games' flaws are never seen until it's been out in the wild awhile. It's not like a piece of software that patches can be issued for. It's not like a blender, where the one thing you want it to do never meaningfully changes.
The things we want from D&D do change over time. And, as you can see with the immense hostility to even the
whisper of true errata, people genuinely hate anything that looks even remotely like patching up problems.
These things combine to ensure that no edition
will ever be "evergreen". Neither WotC nor TSR did enough rigorous playtesting to comprehensively identify the serious problems in whatever they produced--and their game design "goals" are sufficiently diffuse and/or incoherent to be easily "met" without truly doing the things the designers really wanted, just superficially
seeming to.
Instead, we are left with edition after edition where the trunk is riddled with invisible rot before the branches are even grown. The invisible rot is still
there, though, and becomes more and more obvious over time. Eventually, it becomes too much to deal with as designers, and/or players become sufficiently annoyed that they start branching out and looking elsewhere. This is a big part of why "re-release" editions--like 3.5e and 5.5e--never last as long as the original did, even if they breathe new life in for a little while. Re-releases don't remove the rot, they just clear some of it away and reinforce the trunk--and most of the most serious problems can't be removed that way.
The irony, of course, is the only edition that actually could have been evergreen--because it DID in fact allow for the possibility of patching the rules over time!--was shouted down as being The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in ~~Human~~ D&D History, and that very specific thing was often cited as one of the issues, albeit like 10th on the list rather than the top ones that came up all the time.
