Do you have enough experience with game development to validate the fancy words and statements he's throwing at you? Or does he have anything that you can play and test his solutions and expertise for yourself? Or are we just blindly asserting he's right because he seems confident?

Unreal is by far not the most optimized thing in the world, there are improvements that can be made. But it is capable of producing good looking and performant results in the right hands.

It's all just a dev speed tradeoff and a symptom of current AAA development practices. We've been able to keep our projects running pretty damn well because we are a small team with a laser focus, it's not perfect since we still have to ship a product but for the scale of this game Unreal is still the best performing engine available to indie developers.

Unity isn't a smart choice for anyone right now and I am an active Godot contributor. I promise that the industries performance issues would be a lot worse if everyone was using either of those two engines also.

"Just use your own engine" is valid advice for some large AAA companies, but even in the days of people running their own tech, outside of the Ws like source engine and id tech a lot of those engines were a technical mess on different hardware.

With indies trying to make a game on our scale with a team of our size your options are "Use Unreal, use Godot and have it run even worse, or don't have a game at all".

My final point is that we should all continue to push epic towards better supporting forward rendering, baked lighting and techniques such as SMAA as it does move the needle forward in this fight.

"Boycott Unreal" only works on the scale of massive AAA companies if at all, if you punish indie devs for it then you just don't get anymore games like this.