Or maybe you haven't noticed how every game that's made with Unreal Engine, all the way back since UE4, requires far more resources than is necessary to run what it's running.

We'll all wait for you to cite your source on that one, because, no Unreal does not perform particularly worse then any other game engine.

Unreal is broadly available and not just hidden behind AAA walls so a lot of A and AA devs won't have time to optimize their games with it, but they wouldn't have had time to optimize regardless of whether they published with Unity or Godot or any other engine. Unreal is certainly a vastly more efficient engine then Unity, which is its main competition.

Also, how are you squaring away the idea that Unreal is ruining games as art? There are two options:

1. be a creative game designer and spend all your resources on engineers to build you a custom game engine, then spend more resources training everyone at your company on how your specific niche engine works

2. be a creative game designer and use an off the shelf engine like Unreal to run and render your game so you can spend your resources on artists, writers, and designers, and everyone comes in knowing how to use it

Do you really think that number 1 leads to more artistic games? The literal entire reason we're in an indie game mecca right now is because of the widespread proliferation of third party game engines, that let small dev teams focus on the game and not the engine.