^ Can confirm. The tech itself might have had less “complexity”, but devs had to practically (or actually) become engineers of every single piece of the pipeline. The different connectors, the different tubes, how colour works, how the memory functioned (not just how the docs said it functioned), the math that each chip did as the functions were run, everything.

Lack of knowledge of any specific part could mean anything from muddy graphics to a bug in the retail version of the game in a time when there was literally no way to patch a game after release. Those bugs could ruin a company.