I’d agree that the average game dev is on Unity or unreal and won’t be hand optimizing any inner loops.

But there are a surprising amount of studios still on their own tech and there the low-level engineers definitely do (I’ve worked in the industry and have seen it first hand - and done it myself).

It also tends to be at the start of a console’s life span before the compiler and linker is mature up against the hardware.

Many games are still hand optimised in assembly, at least the inner loops.