Textures are larger, where 4k was just getting rolling in 2017 (pre RDR2 after all), to accomodate 4K textures had to be scaled up (and remember width and height, so that's 4x the memory and 4x the space on drive)

Texture resolution has not considerably effected performance since the 90s.

Changing graphics settings in this game barely effects performance anyway.

Things like anti-aliasing for example, they're always something like 8x, but that's 8x the resolution, which the resolutions have only gone up, again rising with time.

Wtf are you talking about, nobody uses SSAA these days. TAA has basically no performance penalty and FSR has a performance improvement when used.

If you're going to try and argue this point at least understand what's going on.

The game is not doing anything that other games haven't achieved in a more performant way. They have created a teetering mess of a game that barely runs.