From the couple of creators I've seen paying it, they were aware of some performance issues for sure. I think they were just unaware at how severe the impact was (since content creators normally have expensive PC's) and how quickly they'd be able to address it.

It never sounded like they were aiming for being super optimised at launch either, but it did seem like they were confident "most" would be able to play it prior to the announcement.

And having watched CityPlannerPlays performance video of it, it sounds like the article didn't really play around with things to see what different settings' impact was. Specifically regarding resolution, it was noted that anything above 1080p seems to be extremely poor in performance.

Why there's no DLSS / FSR also at launch is baffling, it helps GPU bottlenecked necked games greatly (even if boosting from a native 30 to 60 is a bit yuck)

I believe I had heard something about them having issues with getting it running, because for some reason they included their own "render scale" option that runs like ass. You can, fortunately enough, very easily add DLSS to most games even if they don't natively support it though. That's most likely what I will be doing.