I agree with you on that nothing should come at the expense of performance, but all those games you mentioned are tuned for a specific experience more or less similar to an extend.
I can think of a dozen examples of why I would love to have clean water reflections reflecting my character on screen at given moments in gameplay that none of the games you mentioned above have, and I would like no SSR artifacts ruining the moment the story unfolds on screen or not making it work at all. Then again I mentioned that it would greatly help to have the ability to “include/exclude” objects, I believe that would solve many performance issues and I wouldn’t mind hitting a few FPS lower than expected but still above the 30FPS range for given moments in time that contribute to an important part of the game.
All I’m saying is that having the option there doesn’t hurt.