Yup, I’m no pro game dev, and even in my hobby projects I deal with it at the start of development. It’s really easy for character models like this because you do it once for one model and tell the artists (also me) the resolutions for the textures. Then in early development, you use one model for everything while the artists make more variety.

It’s not something any decent dev would leave for later.

I’m guessing they haven’t tuned the multithreading code and they’re getting a lot of lock contention. That’s a much harder problem to solve than LODs or other low hanging fruit. You can turn around LODs in a week, multithreading issues can take months.