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Every mechanic or feature takes money to implement. Sure, it's cheaper to bring back an old mechanic than make a completely new one, but it still takes money. If every single mechanic or feature always came back in the next gen, then we wouldn't actually have all those mechanics because they would've used a lot of budget to bring back old mechanics and thus not as much budget to develop new ones.
Of course, you can make the argument that newer games lack new features or the new ones aren't as good. That's a fair argument, but the problem here isn't inherently "Features have been removed" but rather "There is no good new content, feature or mechanic to make up for what has been cut".
If you look at fighting games for example, it's not uncommon for characters to get cut in sequels, but the developers change the games a lot (mechanically and graphically) and add completely new characters, so fans of fighting games still enjoy the new games. Other games like Smash focus on bringing back all the old characters, but the other side of that is that the game doesn't offer a lot of new stuff, just all the old stuff put together.
SWSH's problem isn't just that it cut old features but that there's not enough content to make up for it in the eyes of many fans, or the content that is there isn't as good for them (i.e. Raids)
