The problem with the gaming industry is the lack of standards of practice, and the lack of strict credentials to practice that practice. In my medical field, I can't do anything without having the proper credentials for it and the training hours that prove I have that credential, I get tested on a practical and theoretical basis all the time, and I also get peer reviewed constantly. When there is a suspicion of malpractice or misdiagnosis, the complaint is taken seriously, and a committee of my peers will do a serious investigation to figure out what happened, and whose to blame.
Ignoring the obvious differences between a profession that deals directly with people's lives and one of pure entertainment, let me take one more stab at your analogy. I admit to getting a bit tired of this discussion because no matter how many times we go over this people just ignore the answers from folks who actually work in the industry and substitute their own narratives, but let's give it one more shot.
In the medical field it's easy to say we want very high standards of care and the like, but when you look broadly at long term strategies and outcomes, it's fair to say that we are far from optimal. Despite ample evidence that we should be spending far more time and effort on preventative and primary care than reactive emergency care, for whatever reason we never can seem to allocate resources to that end. In my country it has gotten to the point that most people can't even have a family doctor and those that do usually can't see them on any sort of timely basis for non-chronic conditions. The medical professionals are working long hours and doing hard work and are plenty qualified, but the system is not producing anywhere near optimal results. If anything, a focus on the bureaucracy is actually harming us at this point because it is too difficult to integrate very qualified immigrant doctors into our system despite the great need.
It's easy for me as a "consumer" to look at this and say that the people involved at some level are either incompetent or at the very least inefficient. There has never been more money devoted to our medical system (per capita) as there is today, and yet the results are objectively worse than they were a decade or two ago. Is this all sounding familiar at all?
Of course you will correctly tell me that there are many other interacting factors that are affecting the analysis: the population is aging, standards of care have risen, external costs have grown disproportionately, etc. But rather than consider the complexity of any real profession, isn't it fair at some level for me to just stamp my feet as a "consumer" and say "sure but if I can't bring my sick kid to see a doctor the problem is on you to fix"?
There are direct analogies to all of this in the games industry. Certainly there's also the fact that anyone can make a game these days, but that effect is largely additive (the rate of new game releases has never been higher, despite rising complexity, etc). Luckily in games though we have a pretty robust mechanism for driving industry behavior based on aggregate consumer desires without any messy ethical considerations: the competitive market. It's a cliché, but as this is pure entertainment nothing more is required than the age old "vote with your wallet". I think the real fear behind a lot of the complaining here is that our personal feelings on certain priorities is probably not as representative of the mass market as we would want, but conversely the market is large enough now for different folks to cater to smaller audiences. If someone isn't hitting your priorities at a certain point just shrug and move on. As a medical worker I would assume you know that it's not worth the stress of being mad all the time.
First choosing the wrong engine for their game (Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and unsuitable for most actual games, and Unity’s virtual texturing solution remains eternally in beta), they didn't even do a proper research on the engine before selecting it for their project. If they did, they would have discovered it lacked functions in key areas (LOD, Geometry Culling, Shadowing, Virtual Texturing). This is developer 101.
You have to realize you are falling victim to the most basic hindsight bias here, right? Almost every project has folks freaking out that it's going to be a disaster and here's all the things that can go wrong. It's easy for literally anyone to pick the ones that didn't come together after the fact and say "see, look how dumb you were I never would have made that mistake".
Furthermore in this case I assume you're aware that CS1 is also a Unity game, and in general the tech worked pretty well there? I don't imagine they had budget or scope to switch to another engine, and certainly not once it was becoming clear that whatever they were trying to do with it in CS2 was not going to get fixed. Again obviously it's easy to say "they should just acknowledge their sunk cost and move on", but I don't imagine there's any world in which these studios have so much spare capital they can pivot the game engine in the middle of project. The notion that companies can just decide to make their own engine from scratch if they discover something is not a good fit is so ridiculous I don't even know if you are being serious.
The options here were almost certainly release it in a bad state and try and fix it up more in patches, or abandon the project entirely. It's easy for us to be sassy and say they should just abandon it and start over, but at the same time I'm sure we'd be all up in arms here if the headline was about a game cancellation and layoffs, right?
tldr: yeah obviously stuff went wrong with games like CS2, and that's why reviews exist. It's fine to say that it's a shame and not buy it, but let's not get so full of ourselves that we think our external 2-bit forum post hot take analysis on how to run a game company is worth anything. To end with another cliché, if you think you have all the answers, nothing is stopping you from proving it in the market.