Thing is 2M doesn't quite get you as far as you think. You get 10 devs (let's say, 4 programmers, 4 artists, 2 designers), pay them 100k each (which is lowballing it in med/high COL areas), and work 2 years. That's 2.4m just from labor, before advertising and other duties like community outreach. Sell for $30 (which is basically the top end of an "indie) and you need 80k copies to break even, more after platform cuts.
That's definitely a scale a AAA studio can afford, but far from what we associate "indie" with in our heads.That's where the exploitation begins.
The original games in the 90's? Yeah, probably. But cost of living was very different (so even if they made > 100k after adjusting for inflation, it went a lot farther), and the standards of games were much lower.
You can definitely make Doom 1993 with 1-3 people today (and without crunch). Making Doom 2016 levels of fidelity (even if we ignore the excellent optimization) would still be a very lofty task for 10 people. We still don't really have that many "full stack game devs" that can work at that scope and fidelity to bring the team size down.
