What you are describing is simple follow the leader. Its what happens to any genre when one game comes to define (or redefine) it. Every FPS had to be Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare after that game came out. Before that, everybody was obsessed with World War II.
Even during the "Golden Age", you have games that didn't follow RE, and broke with the formula in various ways. Silent Hill came out during this time, and it lacked the static camera angles and prerendered backgrounds, with the tank controls started becoming less pronounced from the second game onwards. Corpse Party came out during this time as well, along with Fatal Frame. Overblood abandoned the prerendered backgrounds for fully 3D environments. The Note was a straight up first person survival horror game, the first of its kind, quickly followed by Konami and Atlus's Hellnight, which was also in first person and wasn't a shooter since you had no means of defending yourself.