Absolutely! When you take into account just the artistic aspects (e.g. modeling, texturing, rigging, etc. with professionals specializing just in particular aspects like facial structures, etc.), it really is quite remarkable.
I imagine we'll get more efficiency as procedural and generative techniques become more powerful: characters, worlds, mechanics, etc. are all programmatically generated with little-to-no intervention.
> I imagine we'll get more efficiency as procedural and generative techniques become more powerful: characters, worlds, mechanics, etc. are all programmatically generated with little-to-no intervention.
This absolutely has to happen because humans are really crap at some things, like animating human beings. When I was developing a 3D game in the mid-90s I watched our character animator trying to do the animations by hand and you can almost never get it to look remotely realistic; even now with mo-cap and bones and all the tech, it still looks totally fake (a big recent example for me is Thanos in the MCU who moves like a wooden puppet). It needs that ML layer to sit above everything and fix all the little details that make humans look human and move human.
I imagine we'll get more efficiency as procedural and generative techniques become more powerful: characters, worlds, mechanics, etc. are all programmatically generated with little-to-no intervention.