Sadly, nowadays very few, if any, game developers care about performance or optimizations. Look at recent headline about "Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB" and it was done by simply deduplicating assets. Gone are the days of finding inredible ways to use less opcodes that game would feel smoother.
But ... all that duplication was being _done on purpose to achieve better performance_ due to low-level concerns about access times on legacy HDDs?
I think we can all agree that performance is often an afterthought to game developers, particular in bigger productions, but HD2 is sort of a bad example for that.