I'd say it's remarkably consistent how gamers will pick up on budget reductions and cost cutting in games. This isn't the movies, we aren't going to just spend 2 hours with a piece of media where some editing handwaving can get us to ignore or not even notice something. These are 40-120 hour games here, we're going to notice when business stepped in to tell the creative folks to drop something.

Even Hogwarts, a game that I 100%'d, was obviously affected by that. The fucking Merlin Trials. Revelio? You can't tell me there wasn't some committee decision that was "We have this big open world, just throw those in every 100 feet or so to make it feel active". The more corners are cut, the more gamers will notice. They can bank on that.