Same as the movie industry, there are indie movies that look like student projects and some of them end up being good (amazon is filled with low effort indepdenet films) then you have your Annapurna, A24, Bleeker Street, IFC stuff which is basically funded on multi-million dollar production and marketing budgets like The Whale, that literally everyone watches come award season
The latter is what most people pride themselves on being well versed in the video game landscape. Things like Dead cells, Hades, 12 minutes, Stray, Hotline Miami, Katana Zero, etc. Not the actual 1 man efforts that litter steam.
The stuff people post about here are usually the games that end up having representation at Keighly awards