I'm not saying you're wrong, but these really aren't the same subspecies of indy devs that we're talking about here, hahaha. I'm talking about much smaller team

I'm not saying you're wrong, but these really aren't the same subspecies of indy devs that we're talking about here, hahaha. I'm talking about much smaller teams with a much smaller budget and audience. Like, teams of one to five people. In my experience in interacting with them, most of these small indy dev teams use Unity or Unreal or Godot these days. Outside of graphic design, the graphics don't really cause big issues any more. Having a team of a handful enthusiasts but often slightly inexperienced programmers figure out the flaws in their own game logic is.