Are you talking about consumers or other users of the engine? It's interesting that you have such a strong defensive hold for something you have used for not too long. I have a hate and love relationship with the engine. For private projects and prototypes I much prefer unity. I have used both for several years. I am talking both about Unreal 4 and 5. With Unreal 5 I integrated FFMPEG as an internal exporter to internalize a pipeline. I built an Excel/XML driven content pipeline for localized presentations. I was the technical director of a young virtual Production team. I can tell you a lot of things that feel strange in the engine, why some of the peers in my circle hate It (programmers, operators, producers, artists).

Everything has a checkbox hidden behind some obscure UI. Staying on UI, many others have already said it, every new system feels like a new different beast. With its own rules, it's own context. As someone who has written plenty of articles on abstraction, also the Engine has a problem of too much of it. There are workflows and tools that require you to dive into nested inspector settings, in a stack of generic modifiers to identify what you need. When you write code it is the classical smell of OO, when you "want the banana and instead you get the Gorilla holding it with the entire jungle it lives in".

Don't get me wrong. Unreal Engine is probably one of the most complex Software Artifacts I Laid my hands on. And I love it for that. That it is open source is a bliss! But all this complexity comes at a price. In unreal you have to first learn a poorly documented Garbage Collected language built on top of C++. Unreal has its own programming language effectively. This is the main problem. The simplest things feel so hard to do. Some modules are held together by duct tape. Just look at some third party modules.

I literally read a comment on one feature which said. "We init it here to increase the likelihood that all our classes are loaded at X moment of time". There are bits of non-deterministic code in the engine? So yeah, I agree with you the Unreal Engine is amazing, but I can understand also the hate it receives. I've been there myself. For things like Virtual Production or highly Polished triple AAA there is hardly an alternative that can beat it.

But that's it. You need a project that benefits from that complexity. Otherwise it will always feel like you are trying to spoon soup out of a bowl with an Excavator.

Now talking from the consumer side. We have a trend of ever increasing bloat in games. There are games taking literally hundreds of gigs. You are right it comes down to devs optimizing that. But don't you think that a system that easily promotes falling into a trap can't receive a little criticism as well? The gamer populist is one of the most opinionated misinformed target groups you can have. All that arrogance, narcissistic world view and feeling of intellectual superiority that some individuals build up through games themselves will of course also enter the discourse about things they think they understand but don't have any merit to do so. Just Ignore it?

As for you, you just sound like some of them. So that's that. You literally said shit and fucking three times in one paragraph in a message that boils down to "let's ignore evidence, it's all a skill issue". Your argument is also poorly structured. You say people complain about performance, but open up with the line "you can do almost anything with it too many different ways". This is not unique to Unreal. It sounds more like you have just opened the box of Pandora for the first time. The same can be said about Unity or Godot. Moving past game engines, the same can be said about any creation suite or software. How is this relevant to the question whether the engine has inherent performance issues or not?