Unless it’s changed a lot since I worked in game dev, models absolutely are instanced but poly counts, texture resolutions and number of textures have gone through the roof. You used to have a texture and maybe a light map, now you have separate diffuse, specular, bump, glow, decals, etc. etc.

Everyone’s doing physically based rendering, so now it’s base color, roughness, metallic, and specular. Plus the glow, decals, etc.

Wouldn’t they want to keep reused objects instanced for performance, or is there some other advantage to just meshing everything out into a unique set of level parts?