This is a mischaracterization of the optimization. This isn't a standard optimization that games apply everywhere. It's an optimization for spinning disks that some games apply sometimes. They're expected to measure if the benefits are worth the cost. (To be clear, bundling assets is standard. Duplicating at this level is not.)

This doesn't advance accepted industry wisdom because:

1. The trade-off is very particular to the individual game. Their loading was CPU-bound rather than IO-bound so the optimization didn't make much difference for HDDs. This is already industry wisdom. The amount of duplication was also very high in their game.

2. This optimization was already on its way out as SSDs take over and none of the current gen consoles use HDDs.

I'm not mad at Arrowhead or trying to paint them negatively. Every game has many bugs and mishaps like this. I appreciate the write-up.