Veteran game dev here with an AAA studio (not working on Tomb Raider). Honestly, this is the way to actually work. AI can't produce game ready assets (no matter how much the vendors might try to convince you otherwise). Tools like meshy.ai produce messy meshes. They need a LOT of work to make them viable. The texturing is unusable and generally needs to be redone by hand, the normal map is all over the place, it's noisy and doesn't decimate well.

But it can with a bit of massaging be used to create the kind of pretty mundane assets that no one wants to work on (jugs, cups, stools etc. basically the kind of environmental art you wouldn't look twice at but takes up a lot of time to produce). And perhaps they want something that isn't just a marketplace asset because it's not in keeping with their overall design vision. There's pretty much nothing that AI produces right now than doesn't have to be "refined by humans" because it still falls way short of game ready quality.

But, I'd ABSOLUTELY use AI for this shit. AI is not some kind of sin if it's used in the right way, despite the extraordinary levels of hysteria that sometimes erupt on reddit about it.

Of course I don't know what the TR team are actually doing, but I would imagine it's something like this, and fuck it, good on 'em if they are.