I don't know any game developers, so I can't really speak to their production quality/speed, but this quote just jumps out at me as a really bad thing:

"For game devs, they know from the beginning on that the console they’re developing for cannot handle the raw 3D data, so they need to find optimization patterns right away!"

I understand trying to find the optimal pattern/process for completing a task, but this seems like it's trying to say pre-optimizing is a good idea. I couldn't disagree more.