Yeah, this is a really weird article. Pretty much everything they write fits Gears 5 perfectly, but simply because Gears 5 resonated with them, it's not actually part of that nebulous "Prestige Game" category?
It just meanders all over the place while they keep trying to justify why they don't like certain high-budget-games, trying SO HARD to find a category to define them by. Arguing that Uncharted 2 or God of War or Last of Us is some tired retreat of "better art" that only copies and emulates while Gears 5 is this emotional tour de force full of new ideas and brave steps ahead is just...weird, because the article so utterly fails to make any argument for it (as do the games, of course). It just states these things as fact and then draws the conclusion from those, well, "facts".
Last year, I had different opinions on A LOT of AAA games. I strongly, strongly disliked Spider-Man, God of War couldn't grasp me, Far Cry was incredibly boring to me, as was Red Dead 2. But I never felt like I had to categorize them into some weird "Wanna-Be-Art" category while all the AAA games I DID like were, of course, real art. It's just a really weird approach that the author really fails to make much of an argument for.