It's partially a choice, but partially just a consequence of improvements in technology.
consider 1995. Now, I don't quite remember the exact details, but you would probably find most ingame objects would be using maybe a single 128x128 8 bit texture.
Jump ahead to 2006, and look at something on the extreme end (that I happen to know some rough figures for). - The 3dmark06 benchmark - Here you find procedural textures (which turn out to be quite rare in actual games), but also many 2048x2048 texture maps. Often multiple textures per object (sometimes as many as 6). - 3dmark is extreme for it's time, so we can assume it took several years (maybe even the whole decade) for actual games to catch up with it. But even so, it gives some point of reference.
Many of these textures are 32 bits.
Now, because of how textures are used, and what happens to them, they usually avoid lossy compression.
with that in mind, let's look at what's happened in those 10 or so years. (and keep in mind that 2006 is 10 years ago now too)
well... 128x128x8 is 131,072 bits
10 years later, a 2048x2048x32 texture = 134,217,728 bits
That's 1024 times as much storage space per texture, and something like 6 times as many textures per object...
So about 6000 times as much data. Per object.
Then consider that older games tended to be slightly more prone to recycling their data. (re-using the same texture in multiple places, sharing animation data. A single 3d mesh with many 'skins' to represent different characters... Etc.), while newer games, while still doing that in places, are doing it a lot less...
And perhaps you can start to see the scope of the problem.
Assuming we haven't actually progressed much compared to that figure from 10 years ago, we can see a 6000 fold increase in texture data alone. (potentially - keep in mind hard drive space is dictated by the resources for the highest detail level the game supports).
Now let's say a more conservative game from 10 years ago was only actually using 4x1024x1024 textures per object. (1/4 the size per texture, 2/3 the number of textures per object, So very roughly 1/3 the amount of data.
Now even just jumping to 4096x4096 textures, you now have 16 times the data per texture...
so... Let's say the texture data for a single game in 2006 was 3 gb, now it would be 48...
Then consider the tendency to use uncompressed audio for some reason, and several other trends, and you should be able to spot the problem...
You simply can't improve graphics without also substantially increasing the storage space involved.
Unless you do clever things with procedural textures (and few devs do this to any real extent), you will find your storage requirements going up exponentially.
The only way to counter-act this, is to create games with less detailed graphics, or be vastly more clever about how you create detail in games. But... So far the main solution seems to have just been to throw more and more textures and other high detail resources at the issue...
Crazy? Maybe. But it's simple mathematics, and the consequences of 'better' graphics...