This video is really amazing and complex in details.
The kind that people don't like to watch and thus, fall on generalizations that caused this mess to begin with.

Generalization solutions don't work when you need something so precise as this and his explanation is really deep.
Gotta be honest, I couldn't understand all of it.

But what I noticed was (and I don't really think this is indie/AA devs fault):

I saw a pattern of companies creating huge amounts of propaganda for people to normalize and use specific products that are, apparently, being made by said people who made the propaganda before and normalize, again, said products in the market and for customers that have no access to information, supposedly.

As you explained, about how 2000's games can look good today with enough upscaling technologies and run well, I think its all because back then most developers had to create their own engines and had to optimize them to work with current time hardware.

Nowadays I always hear people saying: "Yeah, we could optimize that, but now we don't need to because we have the technology to run it!" Yes, sure! Just that 5% of humanity will have the money to enjoy it. The others will, well, as always, complain that product was not well made.

Dropping the "rant-like commentary", its a difficult problem to solve:
While we could argue that devs must develop their own engines like in the past, this is by no means feasible for 8th gen demands. Talking about small games with simple mechanics and not so many complex assets, maybe, but what about middle-sized dev companies producing AA games?

Those engines "empowered" (I started hating this word because of how its being used nowadays, but anyway... :P) developers to create AAA-like products and its amazing.

My mind rests in the idea that a middle-ground solution will be found where, like others have said on this thread, they will learn to use those awesome tools correctly, rejecting generalization tools that unoptimized games while embracing and developing technologies, with the community, that creates better optimized games for last gen and current gen hardware.

There are other problems "below the surface" though.
But this would derail the talk to the point of being another thread, and forum, discussion topic.

Thanks for sharing his channel and this amazing video!

About this, completely agree.
Here's an example of that from the comments on the video liked by @ClassicGamer592: We can't say this happens most of the time, but its definitely happening.
Not even the developer know what he is doing, and it kinda breaks hearts.
He's just following generalization criteria based on his own senses, or project superiors.

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Edits:
Wording, corrections, add info..

Both. UE5's appallingly bad optimisation (and developers complete lack of competence / laziness) is disproportionately worse than before. Eg, wind back the clock a decade and UE3 games from the early 2010's - examples like Alien Isolation, Bioshock Infinite and Dishonored actually ran very well at 1080p on High settings on low-end GPU's of same era (eg, GTX 750Ti, HD 7790) that cost £100-£150, and only dipped below 60fps on Ultra. Back then turning down settings from Ultra to Low also often doubled the frame-rate as they put in the effort for play-testing "disable the settings with the largest performance hit but smallest image quality impact first".

Today you can blow £300-£400 on a "budget" GPU and still get 40-50fps at 1080p, and turn down the settings only for the game to look worse rather than run faster, only to met with "upscaling is the new norm!" gaslighting. You compare how a shiny new UE5 2024 AAA game looks on Low using 9GB VRAM at 1080p next to a 2014 Indie game on High using 1.5GB VRAM at 1440p and conclude : we are very definitely on a "post-peak developer competence" downslope at the moment...

It is difficult to describe n accurate figure i guess...... I mean these are only measurements taken from my card.... but with my experience with nvidia i could assume that for a reasonable 60 fps on 2k stand the numbers probably won't differ to much if your running a 3090Ti a 4090 or the coming 5090...... That always manages to confuses me a lot. Like why does a card that is sold as 4 times more powerful end up with similar behavior in fps locked or power locked situations??? You tell me!

developers are coding like improv groups, you need to see these monkeys code.
i'm 42!! i am still coming up with new and faster ways to do math and draw visuals.
we have all this hardware that optimizes data flow and has advanced methods.

nearly every system has a NPU... how many games used it so far?
every nvidia gpu has physix, no one uses it. "maybe because nvidia didn't make it less annoying to use..."
games can run twice their speed... that does not sell hardware... so it's crime for crime..

the days of developers brute forcing their code to waste no cycle... is dead..

The currently most impressive engine in overall is probably Decima, the one used in Horizon Zero Dawn and other titles from this series. Apart from Kojima only Guerilla Games is using this engine.

UE5 is... simply a new "industry standard" able to provide next gen graphics and surely high flexibility... but it is a big performance hog: This is the true downside of this engine which may require some improvements else it will result into a "hardware war" and GPUs above lower-midrange (basically above Intels Arc series) are a "luxury hardware" for a good time already.

Gamers can check out the price of a PS5 Pro, which is one of the most expensive console ever made... yet this is it what it takes for having sufficient hardware for really demanding engines. The price will probably not come down... so i guess it is safe to say this will be the new price tag in the future for "capable" hardware.

Sure, the new Intel Arc is a "fresh piece of affordable GPU" but lets be honest... it is not the GPU you can run 4k and/or always nearly maxed out graphics with. The minimum would be the "category" i used for more than 2 years already which is at the spot of 3090 TI/7900 XTX and 4070 TI+.

Sure, even the Decima engine is leeching the PS5 Pro like crazy on the newest "Horizon Zero Dawn Remaster" but many of the stuff i was able to detect there on the PS5 Pro was really impressive... it looked in many cases better than for example "Stalker 2", which is a UE5 game.

Since I play only on (gaming) laptops, my solution to that problem is to play AAA games many years after their release, when mobile GPUs have caught up and are able to run those games satisfactorily. Plus, of course, the games themselves might have received some performance optimizations in the meantime as well.

This has worked so far, unfortunately now they are saying Moore's law (and Moore himself) is dead so maybe we need that 450W GPU to play The Witcher 4 also in 2050 (providing it is released before that)?

Maybe we should at least leave x86 behind and start using more energy-efficient ARM-based CPUs, like Snapdragon? That's a start. Not sure if NVidia GPUs have similar old backwards-compatibility stuff dragging it down as well, or is it as optimized and power-efficient as GPUs can be?

I just had another run (only 18 minutes) in Darkblade Ascent. A rogue dungeon runner, developed by 2 brothers from Europe. So these guys developed the entire game in UE5, with an DLSS option. I just played in high settings, 60 fps, quality dlss settings and found a 160W average power draw.

When you look at the attached image you can see that in terms of model detail the game severely lacks compared to its higher budgeted counterparts. Still, the overall visual quality wildly 'outperforms' any pre-2020 game no matter it's budget. I much prefer this result over any other (unity)