Yep, as a fellow game developer (programmer) I had similar concerns... Until recently.

Unity had the issue of the high skill floor of creating meshes for scenes until recently. You can now build reasonable looking unity scenes using a process akin to Hammer and QERadiant; albeit still inferior to those, IMHO.

There's also the resurgence of interest in crunchy arcade shooters, using classic engines no less, which is drawing attention to tools like DoomBuilder and TrenchBroom.

Annnd VR tools are making complex mesh building a lot more accessible by making it a lot more intuitive.