> 100,000 vertices for pile of logs isn't really a bad bet on tech, though. That is just piling vastly more onto any tech stack than it can handle, with nobody having the time or the political okay to do a perf pass through the code and put all these ideas on a diet.

I can easily see this happening though.

Artist starts making assets, asks "What's my budget for each model" and engineering/managers reply with "Do whatever you want, we'll automatically create different LODs later" and the day gold master is being done, the LOD system still isn't in place so the call gets made to just ship what they have, otherwise publisher deadline will be missed.