Former PlayStation boss says games are "seeing a collapse in creativity" as publishers spend more time asking "what's your monetization scheme?"

That's a lot. There's also a lot of project management bloat, churning the same work over and over because the direction of the project keeps changing. And it's also a whole lot that it's become normal for AAA games to have absurd scopes, 70 hour play times, open worlds, every mechanic anyone has ever heard of, etc.

The physics of light thing is handled by the engine so unless they're making one from scratch (which no one does given that in-house engines are shared across teams) it's not a time sink for the studio

Unique assets are a bigger problem yes

Bug fixing when the game has a poorly defined scope is a big one too