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If parallax mapping is more expensive than just rendering the equivalent polygons, doesn't that imply that the Spider-Man games are being wasteful with their texture-based building interiors? I thought it was supposed to be an optimization and rendering actual objects would be wasteful. Have I got that wrong?

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It's not wasteful because Interior Mapping replaces many objects (which would each have their own vertices and textures) by a single square and texture, so you can have a complex room with many objects at the cost of a single object.

Example: https://andrewgotow.com/2018/09/09/interior-mapping-part-2/

I could also add to that in Spider-Man they're not using parallax mapping for the interiors, it's a different technique that instead creates four quad surfaces inside the pixel shader I'm not sure however if the performance is cheaper or not, I'm a different kind of tech artist

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