Very insightful posts, solid snake. Unfortunately, very small amount of game developers care about the performance. Especially, with the additions of DLSS and FSR it became a standard to use that tech. No game released with UE5 can be described as ground breaking. None of them have graphics that will blow anyones mind, they still look like games. But the problem is that with very powerful GPUs we have got today and no difference between visual quality of the games from 5-6 years ago, todays games are very resource heavy.
And i will agree with you that manual work with lighting, lods will always be better way of making optimised games than just slapping nanites and lumen, especially for “lower end” gpus. Lower end meaning no current gen, even though they were capable of running beautiful games with no issues just a couple of years ago.