it's not well optimized at all damn what happened?
I played this a few years ago and it wasn't this bad.
it's also triple the size it used to be.
Why would they have to optimize an unfinished product? It's a development build meant primarily for testing, not the final build. Between the past and now, the game has had a lot more development done, from world updates to more characters and features (primarily for the sandbox mode for now). This also will add to the size of the game, both just in the game and also how much storage space it takes up.
kinda sad tbh not even mentioning the constant crashes.
Due to the change from UE4 to UE5, a lot of older hardware will now struggle running the game, which will result in crashes. Other crashes can be related to just simply the game not being a release or final build and as such is not optimized. If you are getting crashes, then let the devs know about it so they can possibly fix it.