I think a lot of the plugin tooling for Unreal promotes bad practices with asset management, GPU optimization, and memory management. I'm trying to say that it allows shitty/lazy developers and asset designers to rely on over-expensive hardware to lift their unoptimized dogshit code, blueprints, models, and textures to acceptable modern fps/playability standards. This has been prevalent for a few years but it's especially egregious now. Young designers with polygon and vertex counts that are out of control. Extraneous surfaces and naked edges. Uncompressed audio. Unbaked lighting systems. Memory leaks.

I've found that in my personal experience in experimenting with Unreal, the priority matches developing DNNs and parametric CAD modelling applications for my day job: effective resource, memory, and parallelism management from the outset of a project is (or should be) axiomatic. I think Unreal 5 runs exceptionally well when that's the case. A lot of the time, one can turn off all of the extra hardware acceleration and frame generation AI crap if your logic systems and assets are designed well.

I know this is a bit of an "old man yells at cloud" rant, but if one codes and makes models like ass, of course their game is gonna turn out like ass. And then they turn around and say "tHe EnGiNe SuCkS".

No. Fuck you. You suck.

Unreal pushes a lot of "hip tech" that supposedly improves performance, but often it turns out that many example cases are just really poorly optimised. With more traditional optimization techniques more can be achieved.

Unreal can perform really, really well, it's just that it won't by default. And many devs are too lazy to properly profile their games to figure out how to improve it.