Environment and character work was generally great in 4, but just look at that Phantom 'explodes' in the very first mission... It's remarkable how weak some of the presentation in the game was. While 4 did have some talented people working on the franchise still, it was obvious by then that 343 no longer cared and QA was absent. Also way way too much lens flare
1-5 were all great. That series is the definition of "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Too bad that also means stagnation. I couldn't get into 6 at all
Most people saw the facial animations and swore it off before even playing the game. Looking past it's flaws, I always felt it was a fine sequel, though the first game is definitely still the special one.
Epic provides an engine with a lot of features including a wide swath of performance optimizing tools, but it's still up to the developers to implement the concepts and workflows correctly to keep their project bloat free at runtime. The 'crazy visuals' you're used to seeing from Unreal are always going to be big studios with a team dedicated to working on optimization, or for projects that aren't realtime or aren't interactive.
So you're telling me all we have to do is beg the bots in multiple ways not to read the page and only the malicious bots will get away with it? Win - win - win I think