There have been a couple of games with atrocious performance on PS4 including Broforce and Firewatch—and Broforce is a 2D sidescroller(!)
I don’t know whether Unity is innately bad, or whether frameworks in general just tend to enable bad code.
Would love to hear more from people who know more; right now I associate Unity with people starting out in games rather than a platform people continue to use after they hone their skills.
Unity's massive problem is that it's still using an ancient version of Mono, with awful garbage collection and other performance issues.
In most other respects, it's an acceptable game engine. It's been used for a ton of big professional games you've probably played without even being aware:
Not only that, Unity games also have a very inefficient game loop, which incurs a LOT of latency on input. You don't notice it much on consoles, but on the PC, with 60 FPS, and the mouse, it's super noticable.
Honestly, you can make a horribly inefficient game using any engine. Unity just has a lower barrier to entry, as it's very hobbyist-friendly (as you rightly point out), so there's more games being made overall with it, more games made by people with little experience in performance optimization.
I don't see this as a bad thing, either. The tradeoff, from the hobbyist's point of view, is that if you decide to use Unreal Engine, for example, your cost of learning the tech is so high you're unlikely to ever finish your game.
Source: I'm a (professional) game developer and we've used Unity for multiple projects.
You can write crappy games in assembler if you like. There are plenty of horribly performing Unity games simply because it sets a lower bar for developers. Also, rather ironically, developers using the less expensive license are forced to show the Unity logo at launch which tends to associate Unity with low-budget games.
There are plenty of awesome games done in Unity which you probably didn't realize they were done with Unity.
I don’t know whether Unity is innately bad, or whether frameworks in general just tend to enable bad code.
Would love to hear more from people who know more; right now I associate Unity with people starting out in games rather than a platform people continue to use after they hone their skills.