The problem is none of the "indie" devs actually properly expose or scale the UE5 engine and leave a bunch of graphical settings active or at higher settings than even the high end modded gamed do today.
For example, the resolution scaling most of the time is set wrong, the 100% scaling is actually 200% (meaning your 720 floating borderless window you multi-task with is actually rendering internally at 1440). You need to set it to 50%, you can test this with AA in the highest setting and you'll notice what I mean in some games.
Foliage scaling by default is usually 2x than the default rendering distance of UE4, and unless set by the developer properly, they don't have LOD's, or their LOD's are set wrong.
Shadows tie together with Ambient and any other kind of Volumetric effects, and this kills most GPU's. Most budget cards cannot run decent looking Volumetric Lighting, so it's better to disable it, but since you can't disable them, especially with the Shadows only going to low, you stuck with some muddy looking lighting, even if you don't see the Volumetric effects properly, they're still being technically rendered.
Also, most of the time reducing you're shadow settings doesn't actually reduce the shadow quality properly, it's just disable stuff like Self-Shadowing and the shadow distance also doesn't get changed properly at further distances.
This also ties into the Global Illumination stuff, some dev's outright forget not to have everything be dynamic lights, with high quality shadow/light casting, especially with Lumen, so you literally have "always active, but not rendering" effects in a scene, with a "disabled" Lumen, but it's actually active if you pay really close attention, and this eats away at performance like crazy.
4K textures which still render in a muddy state, because a scene is trying to constantly load every single textures without accounting how far away the player is from certain things.
Sometimes the developers with literally make the "grass textures" on the ground into an "effect" (if you disable effects completely, the ground will become like a chessboard) and have the performance cost akin or a real-time fur shader. Some UE4 engine games even did this mistake.
Adds all of this with a game that might be trying to render an entire island, with models that aren't "baked" in the scene (you can't simply put a statue in a scene and call it a day, you have to clarify it's a static statue and won't blow up like Battlefield 2042 with all kinds of high end, shaded dynamic giblets all over the place) and you have a recipe for disaster.
Fun Fact: All these options already exist in UE5 as an .ini file in your Users Directory folder to tailor your options, and you can do it yourself manually if you need (like disabling Chroma or Film Grain in many horror games), but the absolute incompetence of some people to not expose any of these options for no other reason than "we didn't read the UE5 Options Manual and how to present it to the end User" is really high.
If a solo Russian Horror Game Developer is able to expose in the option Menu "Shadow Self-Interesting" as an On/Off Button, there no reason people making bank can't.
