This is like 2007 news you latent potato head
Precisely, time collapsed in 2007, the world ended and you just kept hallucinating. I'm sorry, but there is no "RPG Renaissance", there's no "Kickstarter", no "Barack Obama", there's no 8 year old tranny sitting in the UN Security Council. It's all lies and you should be thankful for it. I guess letting yourself be captured by the demented projections of an evil sub-dimensional archon is easier than facing reality.
Going back to the topic as I didn't want to shit up the thread--I think talking about "intellectual stimulation" is framing the issue incorrectly. Whenever smart developers try to make fun and interesting games and they succeed, you're likely to get something "intellectually stimulating". The opposite happens when you have dumb ideas and vulgar people. The nature of the game determines the kind of stimulation, it's not something you can put on by giving your game 2,150,000 lines of text, "mature themes", making it turn-based, old-school, etc. What is true for RPGs is true for "shallow" genres like arcade racers, platformers, etc. whose better examples stand out from the rest just as clearly as good RPGs from bad ones. One only needs to play them to know.
The greatest enemy of good games is probably games journalism, conventions and the whole organization of middleman striver interests who became representatives of "gamer culture" for the industry. They are, in fact, part of the industry, its detritus. Therefore, to avoid those things as much as possible is the best practice. Otherwise, I don't think current developers are impoverished in relation to 20 years ago. Every historical time has its particular energy and creative momentum and there probably are periods one might consider "sterile". It's incorrect to do a post-mortem on something that is still living, though. The present time might still bring us wonders.
EDIT: I should also add that a few modern games like Kenshi, F:NV and AoD really defied my expectations and made me lose myself in them for long periods. I found it interesting that, in their own way, they were all fruits of single-minded focus and determination.