Even simplest (in terms of graphics) 2D games like Balatro have custom shaders today. It's an extremely valuable, and commonly applied skill set among game devs

Even simplest (in terms of graphics) 2D games like Balatro have custom shaders today. It's an extremely valuable, and commonly applied skill set among game devs. > game engines... all the possible style choices Nah. Nope. Never happens. Game engines might have node-based shader editors, but they're roughly as low-level as GLSL. Honestly I don't even know whether I'd call GLSL shaders "low-level." When I hear of low-level graphic code I'd imaging one's talking about managing pipeline state objects manually or something.