If you notice how fast the PR and guides for optimizing performance has come I'd say not only the developers but everyone that's not the top of the top knew the game's pain points.
When I was a game dev the argument went something like this: "Well, computers will be faster once we finish the game, so don't worry too much about the performance right now."
Two years later: "WE NEED TO RELEASE THIS TOMORROW. JUST MAKE IT BUILD AND SHIP IT!"
It's satire, people are reaching way too far in this thread (ex. IGN's review is using 3080 / Ryzen 7 and they were happy with performance)
The site none of us can read probably has more info about this being a RTX 4090 quirk. And it's not exactly surprising the dev team wasn't optimizing for RTX 4090, and the quirky reaction here would be justified if they were.
> It's not like Nvidia completely rebuilt the GPU between revisions
NVidia absolutely changes the assembly language rather dramatically between iterations. That's why the code is in NVidia PTX (or HLSL / Microsoft's DXIL, DirectX Intermediate Language), and then recompiled to actual GPU assembly each time you install a game or run the code on a different system.
I have not seen an instance where a GPU series that has been out for over 12 months has regressed in performance prior to an older one
Perhaps back in the very early accelerator days when everyone was making GPU-specific hacks of Quake 1 but even that was smoothed over by the transition to DirectX/OpenGL/GLiDE at the time
The project manager said "Not high priority for launch", then closed the ticket.