Unreal I believe can stream huge maps built-in. It's really quite a nice engine. I blame a lot of the problems attributed to Unreal to the developers. There seems to just be a penchant for making the same old shiny rubber console game. Something I've noticed is every single time I use a texture, like a generic thing everyone uses, some rock, some dirt, etc., it's always a bit shiny by default. I'm using lots of little point lights, street lights, things of that nature and shiny looks so wrong. But it seems to be the default for some reason.

I really think the secret trick would be just to force developers on lower end machines. I mean I know because I'm starting so low that if I do ever finish this game that suddenly I release it and it's already good for Steam Deck or whatever. I didn't have to optimize it much because it was optimized in process. If I do something that kills performance I go fix it before it's ballooned. They will never do that though.

Nah, it's overuse of Lumen. Lumen is cpu bound so it slows everything down as the draw has to now wait even longer for the CPU each frame. Since most games are already CPU bottlenecked it just makes everything so much worse.