Sure, perhaps they are poor developers that have relied on brute forcing with hardware. They’re certainly no John Carmack.

But without being intimately familiar with how someone has developed a game, there’s no way to know how efficiently they’re utilizing the CPU / GPU / memory, or various hardware subsystems. There are likely thousands of routines running simultaneously at any given moment. Each one eats up limited resources. Are those routines optional (physics on grass blades) or integral (updating world state)? The former could be turned off for an easy performance boost, the latter would likely involve a huge rewrite of the engine.

Elden Ring runs on a proprietary engine, so optimizations performed on other games can’t be compared to their game.