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Just following in the footsteps of the restaurant industry. McDonalds has risen to the top as the worlds most successful restaurant by a very wide margin.
MCU is the McDonalds of film. Simple, formulaic, predictable, scalable, and, unless you eat it too often, even enjoyable. A safe, predictable bet.
Broadcast television took a similar turn years ago, to pundits and reality tv. Low quality, low effort, predictable and repetitive content.
Never forget the goal is to maximize profit by maximizing revenue, but also minimizing risk and cost. This minimizing risk and cost part is hugely important, and is why I always laugh when people are surprised giant corporations aren't producing genuine art. Why should they? Look at what pulls the money in. They're optimizing, basically. You know how you optimize video games? They're optimizing us.
This is demonstrably untrue, and contradicted by your own statement. Guardians 3, Spider-Man Across the Spiderverse both did very well in theaters despite being big franchise movies. Audiences aren't tired of the theater, they are tired of spending big dollars for badly written movies at the theater.
Disney and Marvel have been cranking out a massive flood of titles over the past 5 years, and that has diluted the talent pool and shortened the development pipeline forcing way more cookie cutter scripts going through far less review with much worse CGI hitting the big screen. It isn't cinema people that is keeping people away, it is bland, uncreative cinema with bad writing.
I think you missed OP's point that studios care about minimizing risk as much as they care about maximizing profit. Sure, if you take risks maybe you'll come out with a smash hit that makes you billions-- but you could just as easily come out with a bomb that costs you hundreds of millions of dollars.
Let's say your studio has a budget of $500 million for this year. You've decided to produce 10 movies, each costing an average of $50 million to make. You could take risks, leading to two gems that each pull in $500 million, and eight stinkers that "only" pull in $5 million. (Remember, they cost $50 million to make each, so you're losing $45 million per flop here.) You end the year with $680 million, for a profit of $180 million. Not bad, all things considered, but not spectacular margins.
Alternatively, you could play it safely by numbers, and make $100 million per movie. Now you're making a profit of $5 billion.
If you're a corporate exect who doesn't give a damn about art and only cares about the numbers, it's tragically a no-brainer.
Spiderverse was a rare exception, I'll grant that one.