My understanding is that Unreal is a garbage engine for optimization at face value, it has a lot of useful tools and a lot of incorrect/dated documentation for those tools some of which are also just kind of configured wrong as their default settings. If effort is put into optimization to configure things correctly and only use the various tools like nanite or lumen in their actual use cases (rather than just throwing them on everything) you can get some pretty fantastic optimization.
TLDR: Good but complex tools marketed as low effort with bad defaults and exagerated marketing.
I found 1 and 2 were games I could both replay at least once. With 2 the only bad bit to replay is bricks area where the devs just spammed a ton of very spongy enemies in a big map. 3 had more fun vault hunters mechanically but even during the first playthrough so much of it feels like filler content (like literally ALL of Hammerlocks area) and the final boss is somehow even more dissapointing than BL1, trying to play through a second time is at least 2/3 “Oh god not this bit again”.
But graphically intense is a supply side decision not a demand side one, most of the big hit indie games including 3D ones are either overtly styalized or doing a kind of pseudorealism that looks clean without having to model the refraction index of individual rain drops.
Don’t forget the game development is increasingly shoving the hardware burden onto the consumer by using poorly made tools to streamline development with garbage optimization which is why a gaming rig now has to be powerful enough to simulate a gaming rig from 10 years ago down to the atomic level but the graphics haven’t gotten appreciably better.
Consdiering the PPE, the Ferries, HS2… Spending immense amounts of money on projects that never get finished seems to perfectly align with british culture.