I meant in relationship to the entire pipeline, not just what is easiest for the artist but causes problem everywhere else.
My hunch is that it’s just a lazy artist and it’s not a good practice, but, with some testing it may be confirmed that in a lot of cases, what seems like overkill mesh might actually make more sense than a traditional mesh + normal maps.
I dunno if this is the case here or not, i guess if the author wanted to make a case they could.