Comment by Hamuko

I work in gamedev and I'm on your side in this.

But I should note that once you ship a product in this space there is a heavy emphasis on not breaking much. Changes are for the next milestone (seasons, service packs, new features). There's very rarely any emphasis on "fixing" something because it could introduce even more bugs and Producers prefer sitting on a stack of known issues than addressing them with more unknown ones. Since known issues have a known cost.

Until it gets so bad that you have to make health patches, we made such patches (and referred to them internally as "Sanity" patches)

Sure. I'd be embarrassed if they didn't have the issue on their backlog ("Load times are high"). But the priority seems low, and the actual effort and viability of a fix seems unknown. Speaking as an engineering manager, that is very much going to be a "if you have spare time" ticket. Now, I also try to ensure people have spare time to investigate stuff like that, but that's me, and I don't work in game dev. I can easily see another manager, especially one in game dev (where what keeps players coming back is new content and features, not reduced load times) prioritizing other tickets ahead.

(disclaimer: I'm not in game development and only read about this)

Usually different staff rolls on and off at different times of product development and post-release lifecycle. I understand that most programmers would have been rolled off a while before launch. You early on have people build or adjust the engine and tooling, but later on you don't need most of them anymore and things come down to creating content.