I liked Jonathan Blow’s ‘Preventing The Collapse of Civilisation’ talk on the same topic from 2019. [1] Although, it’s more related to software engineering. Previously discussed on a couple occasions. [2][3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

I think you might find these topics useful, especially Jonathan Blow's as he notes changes (we have more abstractions that take us away from gaming progamming which was easier before). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127098

One interesting note was that TempleOS which is called a religious OS had a Commadore64 structure and it was apparently easy to make games on it. You mentioned learning unity, the old game programmers would make ISA games that had no OS overhead, ran on all hardware that supported the instructions which happens less when the engines are abstractions that are designed to run on more abstractions like the OS, which of course costs performance, has more bugs, and basically filters your intentions, as well as every version of the engine, OS and other factors a game developer can't control will degrade their software through no fault of their own.

Check out this game made on TempleOS. https://scumgames.neocities.org/blazeitfgt.html