I don't doubt they saved that much- you can naively downsample a 512x512 texture to 20x20 and it will take up less 98% space and look about 98% more ass. And clearly what they invented looks better than that blurry blocky alternative, but how much better? It's sure not 100% as good as the normal hi-res, and at short distance, maybe worse because you notice the hard edged Art Deco shapes more than you would notice the blurryness.

Maybe looks as good as a really well made 128x128 antialiased texture that's 1/16 the size, with hardware filtering, but that's the subjective part, which is why it's a meaningless saving figure.

And the 'meh' screenshots matter, because now that you're only taking up 2% of your old texture size, are you using that to make your texture maps look 50x as vivid, or 50x as detailed, 50x as varied, or just 50x awesome on some way, vs. what they are or otherwise would have been? From the screenshots; no. Not seeing it.

They're able to use such small textures by drawing things in a way that fits the shapes. So the art team probably likes this even less than the other developers ( also less likely than the coders to complain because they "have an art job*- at a game studio- in the 2020s ) for having to learn a janky, probably-vibe-coded internal tool to draw all their stuff instead of Krita and Aseprite or whatever.