I mean you said it, with the budget and time that went into this thing, it should look way better. We should not be seeing last gen lighting, last gen asset quality, last gen draw distance, last gen foliage, last gen rain and sandstorm effects for a game with SIX long years of development. They were helped by GG and Sony XDEV too.
Obviously a lot of work went into the game. It's clear they all worked every day for six years. Cutscenes artists, level deisgners, combat designers, writers, programmers, everyone clearly worked hard on making this 90+ metacritic game. When we say lazy, we are talking about how the people in charge of upgrading the engine to allow artists and designers to achieve visuals consistent with this gen's standards. RTGI, mesh shaders, and simply a 4kcb 30 fps target wouldve allowed them to push for better lighting and visual fidelity.
Targeting a full fat native 4k 30 fps limits artist creativity. It increases iteration time which in turn increases production time because well, you cant run RTGI at native 4k on the base consoles. Lack of something like nanite results in those poor LODs too which not just makes the game look last gen, but also increases dev time.
Actually, this explains why the game took 6 years despite looking like DS1.1. They were working on last gen design paradigms. Avatar and Star Wars outlaws both took around 6 years but look a generation ahead of whatever this is.