Maybe they patched it but in my memory tessellation used to crash my pc, it was a laptop but managed to play the game with tesselation and other heavy settings offDid you actually test back then with console cvars at all though to see if they *really did not like the tessellation* or rather if they really did not like any of the other much more expensive things like SSDO, full res Motion blur, sprite based DOF, SSR etc.
Once again, I am pretty sure people's memory of the event is not the same as the event itself as there was not due diligence back then for checking out what was the actual culprit for DX11 being so heavy in Crysis 2. Testing I did back in the day (and can do again with the right hardware soon enough) showed that the tessellation was a pittance for performance in comparison to the rest of the Extreme quality things they added.