As an actual gamedev - no real extra engineering time is spent on this - during development all textures and assets are usually produced in 8K or higher anyway, it's only during the data packaging step that everything gets downscaled to whatever was selected by tech art. There's a reason why my workstation has 256GB of ram - just loading up the main world of the game easily takes 100-150GB because everything is in such extreme quality. Same applies to visual effects - usually in development you will run all effects at full resolution to test how it all works.
Releasing an "extreme" preset that no consumer PC can really run yet is just a matter of leaving those higher-quality assets in + enabling those full resolution options for VFX. Allowing users to use ray tracing at full resolution(something which will kill any GPU on the market) requires just adding an extra config option - there's very little engineering time required. QC will need to do a full pass of these options, but in the grand scheme of things tested that's not a huge deal.
I mean, it can - but that's also a solved problem. Look at far Cry 6 - you want HD textures that require at least 12GB of vram? No problem, it's just an optional download.
Releasing an "extreme" preset that no consumer PC can really run yet is just a matter of leaving those higher-quality assets in + enabling those full resolution options for VFX. Allowing users to use ray tracing at full resolution(something which will kill any GPU on the market) requires just adding an extra config option - there's very little engineering time required. QC will need to do a full pass of these options, but in the grand scheme of things tested that's not a huge deal.