I think the question is whether Cyberpunk 2077 would ever have been made under the constraints that Blow and Muratori talk about. Like, Order of the Sinking Star looks pretty impressive, but from what I can tell it's basically just a bunch of Sokoban-style games operating on a fixed grid. You don't need anywhere near as complex an engine for that as you do for a game like Cyberpunk 2077.

My impression is that the Blow/Muratori style works well if you're the only person working on a game, or part of a very limited team, which is fair enough, but it naturally limits the scope of what you can achieve.

The Witness is a 3d engine made from scratch. Not all AAA companies use Unreal or Unity.

Having a 3D engine does not a AAA make. The Witness is a beautiful looking game, but the amount of state and interactions it has to deal with is orders of magnitude less than GTA: San Andreas. It is closer to the complexity a Myst remake would have.

It's not a lack of engineering, but a lack of time, no? 5 years later and Cyberpunk runs on the Switch 2, MacBook Air and Linux Gaming Handhelds. While also scaling beautifully to 64 core CPUs or $3000 Nvidia raytracing GPUs.