Nowadays if your game has even one thing wrong and the wrong influencer makes fun of it, suddenly it's trash. At the same time, your game can be trash and if an influencer laughs their ass off at the bugs (in a good way), everyone wants it. It's a sad culture. /rant
(Side note, the ME: Andromeda novels are really good and hinted at a lot of storylines that we may never see closure on, but were certainly building blocks the game was working on getting to.)
Anthem frankly killed them. A live service looter shooter which were already out of vogue by the time it was released. Obviously made by marketing entirely, no soul whatsoever. They never recovered from it.
It might have been successful if it weren't a Mass Effect. Or maybe not, who knows.
Some of that is interestingly handled in the Andromeda novels and there were hints that even some of the cancelled DLC was going to reintroduce some of those elements, but EA diverted the DLC teams to Anthem instead.
This squares with Joker being a fan-favourite character in the main trilogy
I genuinely only remember Ryder and PeeBee by name.
That said, the rumor is the in development Mass Effect 5 had found a story way to bridge the gap between the two and make it seem a lot less like a hard reset and find a way to continue past the ME3 endings.
Of course we likely will never get to hear the ME5 story the way it was scrapped along with the studio in this announcement.
This is a great summary of the entire issue with the game.
I really tried to like it but it didn't inspire any enthusiasm. I didn't really care for the plot, the stakes seemed so low compared to the previous title and none of the races/planets really scratched that explore itch.