One issue I’ve found with stealth games is that the concept of a lone commando outsmarting and sneaking past 30+ guards is pretty unbelievable to begin with, unless the player controlling the commando is actually a tactical genius. So, games tend to have to play pretty unrealistically in order to make the result playable by average players (idiot guards, x-ray vision, generous interpretations of darkness, super movement abilities, etc)

Something I think could be further explored is a game that explores a mechanic of “Plausibility”. Stealth long accepted that guards would react to footsteps. Breath of the Wild including a noise meter helped me think “Hey, why is that? This is a big compound with a lot of people that’s been quiet for the past week - wouldn’t they assume the footsteps are their friends?”

Another concept that I think was explored in a very janky way but could use a second look is the game Shadwen. It’s not a great experience, but it has the interesting idea of combining stealth with Superhot and Braid - you get full control over time, including time only moving when you do, and can rewind instantly from a failure. The game even shortcuts “spotted” phases by giving guards instakill crossbows, so the remedy to being spotted is just to rewind. The fun, then, is in creatively engineering the one-shot stealth circumvention you had in mind, even if a mispositioning messed it up the first 6 times (because it only took 15 seconds to get a successful effort).