This is what not being cross-gen gets you.
...More like this is what being the fourth title for a next-generation platform, shipping in 2023, gets you.
I'd be interested to see Insomniac break down that trailer and point out what's otherwise, but it looks like further refinement of everything they accomplished before (including their first exclusive game, which built upon a lot of technology they constructed for their past-gen/cross-gen releases) rather than a revolutionary rewrite thanks to the exclusive power of the PlayStation 5. Particularly when we're just talking visually (I love the smoke, but what else are we talking about here?,) that trailer doesn't seem to have much aside from the visual clarity to say that it screams next-gen; if a game had robust physics or quick-traveling asset integration, that's a different matter. There's still not a development system or engine (known or shown to the public yet) that is wholly built for next-gen and just severs all possibilities of past-gen outside of the reasonable downgrades or cuts or workarounds.
(Even Unreal Engine 5, it's an extraordinary new way to build and light games... but if you're making a past-gen game, you kind of just turn Nanite & Lumen off and render assets / stage lights the old-fashioned way, then put that version out, still on UE5...if you still can.)
That's not to say that there won't be games that eventually push past the reasonable capacity of past-gen (R&C already does in some ways, FS is a weird case with the Cloud assisting it but it's impressively dense and doesn't seem doable on X1 even though Asobi was at one time considering it, and baking down for instance UE5's Lumen in the Land of Nanite would be...ugly,) but the breakthroughs in the past came through harnessing hardware power through a combination of asset volume and FX techniques against the framerate. We're seeing the volume in the framerate and minute detail rather than a generational leap of stuff on the screen at once, and as far as techniques, we saw a lot of the techniques being utilized now (global illumination, physical-based rendering, physiological animation & IK, things of that nature) used last gen in as much capacity as possible, and now those techniques are either standard features or are being taken to the next level, but it's a forwarding of those things we have seen. "New" is hard to come by, not just because of the "diminishing returns" concept, but because the revolution of this gen beyond the evolution (besides raytracing) is said to be in AI and machine-learned functionality. So like the
muscle simulation added to animation in Spider-Man, the
motion matching animation algorithm by Ubisoft and others,
area and character auto-generating,
volumetric fluids and gases, to a degree the image reconstruction tools like DLSS. Maybe a ML tool will come along that is just designed to create cool shit, but for the last two GDCs the emphasis has been on tools that make game development faster for the designers and more efficient on the hardware to return computing power back to the player. And although developers had been experimenting with that stuff before the hardware launched, it's unfortunately not mature yet.
My take is, it's not cross-gen that's holding PS5/XS back. This is the state of current-gen game development in 2021, and still would have been if Sony had been completely honest when Jim Ryan said, "We believe in generations," and every game were exclusive.