Been searching this up quite a lot and I've finally found out how they sort of do the 'AAA' workflow in games when it's artists that actually know what they're doing. There are tutorials a dime a dozen on sculpting generally but it's amazing how flat out bad some of them are, no way of being polite about it. They're just throwing up a 10 minute tutorial on how to do something and teaching beginners extremely bad practice for the long term.
There's another method involving plane extrusion reptology after you finish a sculpt of a model and those are very common but I feel like that's for people who are absolutely anal about polygon count. This sculpt method provides a great balance for people who want to get something out results wise while still respecting the concept of clean topology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2_uiUEcY7w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZgUAWpiIw8
Here is also a tutorial that properly goes into the workflow for baking sculpted stuff to a normal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8xrSgyfEHs&t=171s
Could easily see myself adapting this for a general animation workflow too thought I'd post up this little research compilation for everybody to look at who might be wanting to get into 3D and of course, all of this is done in Blender. I've also been looking in more detail with texture paint and that workflow is viable as well it's just fiddly with the settings.
Right? Take a look at ZRemesher as well - it's still the fastest consistent workflow I'm aware of, though there are cases where you'll want to do it by hand, and that's where Topogun comes in. You'll want to do some clean-up around loop intersections for animated meshes, but considering game models can exceed 100k polygons these days, getting 98% of the way there in a couple of minutes by drawing guides is pretty great.
Absolutely. ZBrush was revolutionary when it came out, and a large part of why CG took a huge leap forward in the early 2000's. Polymodelling has it's places, but organic detail is not one of them. Doesn't matter whether it's detailing chipped concrete or warped metal, producing gnarled trees or characters, if you want your art to look good outside of "lowpoly" art styles, I'd say a decent grasp of sculpting is absolutely mandatory. It relies more on traditional art skills than conventional modelling, but as you get better you'll find yourself able to sculpt complex characters without references in a couple of hours. Really rewarding being able to make anything you can think of, quickly.
I'd honestly suggest trying Zbrush. It's unfortunately moved to a subscription model, which I'll have to decide on when it gets an update I actually care about (my permanent license no longer receives updates), but nothing comes close in terms of sculpting. It's also pretty great for hard surface modelling where the resulting topology isn't especially important (almost all of it).