Doom the Dark Ages is possibly what they're referring to. ID skipped lighting in favour of Ray tracing doing it.
Bethesda Studios also has a tendency to use hd textures on features like grass and terrain which can safely be low res.
There is a fair bit of inefficient code floating around because optimisation is considered more expensive than throwing more hardware at a problem, and not just in games. (Bonus points if you outsource the optimisation to some else's hardware or the modding community)