Red dead has some pretty lengthy cutscenes to explain the store and you have to do tedious things like hunt and eat keep up weight and stay healthy, feed your horse, and change clothes depending on the weather. None of those things are essential to beating the game though and the gameplay is awesome.
But to answer your question, yes games nowadays are going with longer cutscenes to explain the story. The biggest culprit in this are the Metal Gear Solid games. Open world games tend to take longer to beat but that's cause the add a bunch of side missions and other tedious collectables yo get. Games are my take 20-30 hrs to 100% but the main story can be beat in 5-8 hrs.