Kinda depends on the studio nowadays (and time frame).

I consider all AAA game studios as thoroughly captured and corrupted. They haven't gate kept their own sphere, much less their own company through diversity hiring practices. Hobbies form around passionate but smaller niche communities. When normies (and leftist subversives) enter a sphere, it waters it down, often pushing out the core audience, and the subversives slowly twist the sphere/hobby to mean things never intended or needed by the core fans.

Through greed and capitulation to globohomo, AAA studios have largely accepted the sweet (yet poisonous) ESG funding from companies like Blackrock and Vanguard, pushing globohomo in their products, usually pushing out the passionate core devs which built the studio, replacing them with normies and subversives, who, at the minimum, don't care about the company, medium, or hobby, and more likely, actively hate it and the fans, which is why they're always trying to subvert it, attack the core audience, classic games, and the tropes of the medium, actively making it worse in all regards.

It's why I've pretty much avoided mainstream anything for the last several years, as they've all gone this way. For gaming, I still find enjoyment playing games from indie devs, still populated by those passionate core players and developers, who don't put in the globohomo, and don't implement the caustic modern gaming design/publishing, like paid DLC, tons of bugs at launch, paying "reviewers" and shills to overly inflate their ratings, anti user DRM, microtransactions, pay to win models, always online, etc. Just look at CDProjekt Red. They made probably the best modern RPG, The Witcher 3, but when all the core devs that made that gem left (or were pushed out), the company and every game they've made sucks. They've even put out videos detailing their support for globohomo. Bioware, Bethesda, Blizzard, and more, all used to be reliable for making great games. Now they're a hollow shell, used to make globalist propaganda with a game skinsuit.

Do developers need to be intelligent to make games, even bad ones? Eh, kinda. The profession requires a bare minimum of intelligence, but from all the bug riddled games being released by AAA studios, I don't chalk much up to their intelligence, only their poor ability to learn facts (coding/design) and regurgitate them on command, like so many other soulless brainwashed automatons (NPCs) in the modern world.