Instead of focusing on what is “too much settings”, i prefer game studios taking the approach of the settings of e.g. Assassin’s Creed Origins. Not only do you get the usual presets in the menu, but also some stats to your performance. E.g. how much VRAM is used/available. What’s your GPU and CPU load, RAM usage,… And for every setting you hiber over and change, you will get a (cumulative) prediction in those graphs how this combination of setting will affect which part of the system. That way you can tweak the settings more easily to your preference and your system. You may not be able to get a decent frame rate with higher poly models, but you might have enough VRAM to afford higher res textures and get better image quality that way. Having denser crowds might affect CPU load more than GPU load, so your GPU might not be the bottleneck of that feature and so on.

As a game dev, that sounds so complicated to implement. Showing numbers for what is currently happening sure, predicting what will happen and graphs and whatnot? I hope I’m not the one doing that

I’m with you, but I think they (large studios/publishers) may have that data anyways from their QA or when checking system requirements. They do not need to be completely precise. Even something like „well we’re using 6 GB VRAM, 4GB of that are textures. Increasing texture quality to the next tier is roughly a 25% increase in texture size, so it will probably take an additional 1GB of VRAM“ can go a long way to help gauging whether that setting might be bad for performance or not on your machine

lol I imagine you have to just be like a meteorologist and ballpark it by squinting hard and nobody can say anything if you’re wrong