Luckily it seems like there are pretty simple reasons for the poor performance so I'm hopeful they can at least do something even if they don't have a ton of rendering expertise.
But that means that everything is solvable. There's no need in this game for 100,000 vertices for a logpile, so that should be a relatively straightforward task to fix. And someone can rip out all the teeth and put "Principal Tooth Extraction Engineer" on their resume.
I can easily see this happening though.
Artist starts making assets, asks "What's my budget for each model" and engineering/managers reply with "Do whatever you want, we'll automatically create different LODs later" and the day gold master is being done, the LOD system still isn't in place so the call gets made to just ship what they have, otherwise publisher deadline will be missed.