Well, in certain online games the balancing can't just stay static.
But update sizes really are quite insane. One Baldur's Gate 3 update had 100GB and of course that required 100GB additional free space. At that point it was easier to just reinstall the whole game.
The difference in quality of the game designers who worked on the original AoE2 versus AoE2:DE is pretty apparent. I think what is most annoying to me is how much harder it is to parse the visual information of "what kind of unit am I fighting" now that the graphics are "better".
