Helldivers 2 was in the news a few months ago for "optimizing" and saving over 130gb of disk space required for installation or something to that effect. In actuality, what they did was remove an "optimization" they had implemented without ever once benchmarking and realising it was making things significantly worse. The software development industry is a freaking wreck filled with easy opportunities for improvement if only anyone gave enough of a shit about their consumers to profile their code, ever.

I guess it's not just models and textures. Those should be the easiest to dial down, even optionally with a "low" setting. Maybe making high-res assets an optional download, to reduce game size (ssds are also getting expensive)