It's such an easy cop-out... but sadly also very true.
I would love to see providers publish proper statistics on their gameplay, and a small number do publicly (in the game help). I don't buy the counterargument (discussed in other threads) that these would be "misleading" - if you understand then it's incredibly useful, if you don't then it's gobbledegook to you anyway.
The one stat that would help this debate - is how much RTP is being pumped in those bigger wins, say 500x+, 1000x+ and 2500x+. We know some providers are already pumping 5%+ into the top prize alone, so I wouldn't be surprised if some are 20% or even 30% at this point.
When so much RTP is going up top, these latest "innovations" are a very different beast - you're not playing for entertainment, you're not even playing for playtime... you're playing all-or-nothing.
And that's where the variance calculation would bite - because if you're looking at say 1 in 10000 to get a piece of that 20% big win RTP, you would need a substantial number of spins - as in 500k or more - to get a feel for the variance of that part of the curve.
So if we rewrite the 95% as 75%+20% - you'll quickly get a handle on the 75% part after a couple of thousand spins, but the 20% will be much more elusive.
There are multiple culprits we can point to in the intriguing case of
'Who Killed Online Slots?' - massively increasing volatility and impenetrable maths models would certainly be near the top of the list, especially as 'real reels' are basically now a thing of the past (even on reel based games), and obviously so on cluster based games and suchlike. Games such as Bonanza have reel strips so long as to be near meaningless, and can switch them out dynamically depending on what it's doing (or perhaps more tellingly, what it doesn't want to happen).
In the days of the MG Viper Client slots, you could literally extract the reel strips and work out the game maths, plus the paytables often gave a very good indication as to the volatility of the game you were playing. This was one of the reasons I stuck with 3Dice for so long, as they still had a decent number of these more 'traditional' style games on their books, but alas even they went down the cluster game route and I found myself feeling increasingly uninspired by their output. (I had high hopes for their most recent release Dreamweaver, which looks like a reel-based game, but then you actually play it and realise it's a cluster game. Sigh.)
I reviewed it in this thread -
Introducing a brand new Slot at 3Dice -DREAMWEAVER! 100% Match up to $100! - Casinomeister Forum
I remember we discussed some of this stuff at great length when the
whole Jammin' Jars controversy played out, and many of us noted here at CM, and myself in videos on my previous YT channel, that we'd reached a point of complete disconnect between what the player was seeing on screen, and what the backend server RNG was doing, to the point that you're not playing an online slot at all in the sense of what many of us would consider that to be.
Add in all the other stuff that's going on, nerfed RTPs, old (far better!) games constantly being retired (I know it's hard to believe now but NetEnt used to put out banger after banger!), general shittiness from both online casinos and the regulators, along with the increased friction in getting money in and out of online casinos, and of course the constant deluge of what are IMO low-effort games from a million different providers who are motivated to create games that take as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, in their brief 'window of opportunity', as opposed to trying to satisfy you in the longer term as both a player and customer - and well, it's certainly no mystery as to why I've decided to hang my online slotting hat up and do something else.
(Oh and bonus buys of course, which I think have corrupted game design on a fundamental and completely unfixable level for as long as they continue to exist. Plus, lest we forget NLC's action spins, which literally do away with the entire pretence of even making a fucking game at all, reducing the process down to the gambling equivalent of injecting heroin straight into the veins.)
I mean, on a broader sort of level, I actually agree with snorky - i.e. it's all gone to shit and there's no point playing anymore, we just seem to have a difference of opinion on the specifics of exactly what's happened

(And he, for some reason, is still actually playing the bloody things.....)