Don’t know if you’ve heard of the concept, but it is possible to own both a car and several bikes and use the one most suited for the task. I know it can be a daunting challenge for people like you to conceptualize a reality that isn’t based on binary extremes, but stay with me: you take your bicycle for short trips and commutes within the city, but use a car for occasional 400-mile trips. You can even take your bicycle with you in the car if you want to be really woke.
Mind-blowing, am I right? Apologies if this revelation has caused your worldview to collapse.

















Pray tell, how do you think “they” should optimize game assets? People who have zero experience in game development love to talk about “optimization” like it’s a slider in the options or some challenge that can be solved by throwing resources at it. Modern compression algorithms like Oodle are about as performant and artifact-free as mathematically possible. Everything beyond that is a trade-off between quality, size, and performance.
But are you thinking about it in abstract? Would you prefer a game to have occasional pop-in, stutter issues, and CPU spikes in exchange for a smaller size?
(edit) Before you say it, I know there are relatively low-fidelity games that run like ass. Those are usually caused by poorly written game logic or shader codes, which can be refactored, but won’t have an effect on file sizes.