My earliest days had the most fantastic tricks. So called game engines were useless. Now it’s the complete opposite.
I mean, it's hard to disagree when you phrase it this way, but... really? In the old days (mid-'90s) studios like id released many games per year, some of which with completely new technology.
Modern studios and indie developers (!) who "do things in a straightforward way" can be happy to release even one game per year, and that's with a lot of reuse. Forget novel technology once a year!
So maybe these tricks don't really increase time to market that much, compared to other variables that are also in play?
I'd actually like to link the YouTube channel of a person who is writing their own game engine and game at the same time: https://www.youtube.com/c/RandallThomas/videos
You can see how using Godot, Unity or Unreal (or most other engines) would have been much faster in regards to time to market.
Similar differences show up when you try to build the same project, once while using an engine and another without it, the performance can be much better if you write your own optimized code (supposing that you can do so in the first place), however the development still takes much longer, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y
Now, whether that matters to you or not is a different matter entirely: some care about learning a lot more about the lower level stuff, others just want to develop games and care more about the art/story/etc., while others care about selling them ASAP.