Yes, you got it exactly. This is the democratization of AAA graphics. This whole city was made with just a team of 70. (Red Dead Redemption 2 had a team of 1,600.) They relied heavily on Epic’s giant library of game assets that anyone can use. They used procedural generation to mix those assets in to create the map and random procedural generation of the pedestrians. The lighting and physics system are also Unreal Engine features. This whole Matrix project is getting released so devs can use it and base their games off it. The graphics are better, yes, but what this is really selling is the ability to make great looking AAA quality games in less time with fewer people.
To be honest, a team of 70 isn't going to be enough if you're going to make an actual game as big as RDR2 rather than just a tech demo. I'm not convinced until a game studio actually makes a standalone game in UE5 and reports its workflow has become better.
Workflow has improved a lot in ways that can't really be worse, e.g. projects are broken up into lots of small files now so it's a lot more compatible with version control.
