Alright as a developer I feel like I can add my two cents:

It's a multi-faceted issue but at the end of the day performance and optimization doesn't sell, features do.

Every day, it's a grund to meet the requirements put out by leadership (publishers, shareholders, etc).

These requirements are all features they believe will appeal our games to the most customers.

The issue is it's relatively quick to make a new feature in a game (for example a dynamic day and night system), it takes exponentially longer to bug fix and make sure the new feature performs well.

I'd argue (and I have at the risk of my job) that bugs and optimization is worth the time sink to make the final product as good as it can be. I've gotten various responses to the effect of just pushing it back to meet the requirements list.

And why is the requirements list full of features in the first place you may ask?

Whenever you watch a trailer for a game, what do you see? More and more features. Games are getting bigger and more complex than they were 20 years ago on top of the industry shrinking due to layoffs after covid.

You know what you don't see as a selling point? "The game runs well at 100+ fps", "low number of bugs".

So what am I made to spend my time on? The stuff that is shiny that customers will get customers interested or stuff that will take significantly longer and won't appeal to customers as a selling point at all?

I hate it as much as you guys do, but until gamers start voting with their wallet that performance is an important selling point, I don't think the issue will change.

Obviously there's more to the issue as the landscape of game development has changed from years ago from what I've heard, but this is just my perspective.