For the overall franchise, nothing has been more pointlessly devestating than keeping each entry in the franchise in the current year, the age of the Protags, the forced conclusions of events off game all of it stems back to this single choice.
Oh, I fully agree, it's equally stupid they do the same for Street Fighter.
Nobody really cares in which year Street Fighter or Resident Evil games take place, and now they're facing the issue that all their popular characters are in their late 40s of 50s, and it's becoming increasingly implausible for them to keep doing what they're doing.
It wouldn't have been such a big issue if they had used the time to introduce new popular cast members, but for both franchise they keep featuring the same popular legacy characters, and the new blood they do introduce either doesn't gain as much traction as they had hoped, barring the rare exception, or are niggers.
They could have just avoided mentioning the year the games take place in, just keep it vague "early 21st century" and go with that, sneakily updating the technology so the games don't look "outdated."
Dunno where Capcom plans to go with any of this - are they really going to feature Leon in his 60s still suplexing zombies into the ground? Is Chris going to keep the steroid addiction going? Are Jill and Ada going to look like they've had some heavily plastic surgery done to them?
I guess one asspull is that they could say the T-virus either slows down aging, or getting injected with the antiviral agent from RE9 starts regressing their aging?
Or they could attempt to introduce new characters to take over (again), or they simply reboot the whole thing and start from scratch?
Not really sure what they could do, but they'll need to make a decision soon, they have, maybe, another decade to pull the trigger, and that's me being generous.