@berto Bruce Straley left on a permanent Sabbatical after the development for Uncharted 4 finished, and U4 was notorious for having such a terrible development process from start to finish that over 70% of the development team left, including some OG voice actors of the series citing the "weird changes" being done to the script.
Amy Hennig and Justin Richmond were the creative director and game director for Uncharted 4. They worked on the game for 2+ years, then development froze, Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley replaced the original duo, Amy left Naughty Dog entirely, and about "8 months of script" was tossed out. There was a total reboot of the game that changed characters, flashbacks, tone, the antagonist(s), even the gender of Nathan's kid at the end. From start to finish, a ground-up rework in the 2 years left before release. Those developers got crunched to Hell and back, and Bruce left because of what I assume was terrible management and crunch.
Anyway Bruce was the guy who effectively kept the plot to The Last Of Us sensible and told Druckmann "No" whenever his ideas got stupid, including the concept of "someone making a cross-country trip to get revenge on Joel when everyone is trying to survive a zombie apocalypse", but he didn't come back for the second game. Neil scrapped the dumb idea when Straley vetoed it for the first game, but it happens in the second one anyway.
So it's less "modern sensibilities" and more "Neil on an unchecked power trip to make the story he's always wanted to make even if it sucks."