If you're this reductive, then nothing in the world adds anything new and it's all nostalgia. With that attitude you'll never enjoy anything new - maybe, like OP, you're just old?
Being old isn't a bad thing it just means you've seen these things before and can critique them. Obviously if you missed the boat the first time round this all feels fresh and new. This is also why the past is mined because it's full of successful ideas that haven't been recently repeated and as a commercial strategy for producing commodity titles mining the past avoids a lot of the hard work.
I think Three Kingdoms and Warhammer were kind of new though. Having very powerful hero units does change how Total War plays quite a bit. Being set in fantasy is also interesting, because it allows for unit types you can't have in a more traditional Total War setting (flying stuff).
