(disclaimer, ive worked on fortnite as an engineer) 100% this. There would much to say as to why this is the case on fortnite but Ill just say this: fortnite is so big that the development methodology and patterns used shows their limits. One of them being that the game design team decide the features and the engineers code. Instead the two deps should be collaborating to ellaborate solution that are both simple in terms of engineering and relevant for the customers. The best example of that is world of warcraft. Wow is extremely efficient in terms of engineering and yet super fun. What Im saying is that sometimes the engineering dep should prevent a feature from being coded, at least the way the designers see it. Or you end up with a pile of crappy code. I would even go further: the engineers should say first what is possible and whats not. Think ID software: Carmack decides whats running and then the designer try to make a game with that. Add collaboration to this core idea and you get WoW (disclaimer I have not worked on WoW but ID software touch is definitely there impersonated by John Cash).
On the flip side, some of the new ID games are nowhere _near_ as popular as the ones from Epic games, and WOW wound up dying by its own hand, to some extent.
The more time I spend working on startups and less at BigCos, the more I value the non-technical train of thought - unburdened by the implementation details. Sometimes those people are needed to push the envelope. Clearly, Fortnite is doing something right. At any rate, it's not a coincidence that most great companies have someone at the head that _mostly_ knows what's entailed by the dreams, but proceeds to dream nonetheless.
Yeah, ultimately how good the code is (or even how buggy the resulting product) is just a side-effect and not the main goal. Fortnite is making so much money that having to spend 2x as much on engineering because the code is a mess is business wise just not that big of a deal.
Somewhat (obviously to within reason) decoupling design decision from what would be easy/convenient for the developers to implement is often the right thing to do from a business point of view.
