Yep, they knew, that's why they started with a disclaimer
Please don’t get angry for seeing The Last Of Us merely at number five in a ranking about the best things of a specific kind ever made.
It’s definitely good, competent, and very ugly or beautiful whenever it wants to be. Just like the game, it picked the perfect couple of actors to give life to the characters that could carry the massive weight of both the game’s drama and the hopes that more video games could get prestige TV treatment in the future.
But is it really that big of an achievement? It feels like a very safe adaptation of a game that already played like a movie in the first place. HBO’s The Last Of Us is good, but you know what else is good? Watching a video compilation of the cutscenes from the first game on YouTube. I wish we could see a future season starring a new group of main characters on a completely different adventure. Perhaps you can get Henry Cavill to star in it. I heard he likes games.
Not a bad reasoning, I feel the same - it was good but safe. Whereas Arcane and Edgerunners came with original stories, and they're really good on their own.
Was it really as "safe" as the article claims though? They diverted a full episode early in the show to have an hour long homosexual romance episode that completely changed the character paths and storyline for a major section of the game. I'm not really sure what "safe" even means in the context of the article's argument.