It just depends on if you're doing coding on the lower levels or scripting gameplay features. One is a lot more focused on optimization then the other.

I've been working on FPSs and ARPGs, which AFAIK are among the more perf sensitive genres, at least as far as mainstream genres go.

Huh I am surprised perf wasnt more of a focus. Maybe the art style was intentionally keeping things hardware friendly?

The art style was your regular 'realistic' one that most AA/AAA games use, though even if it wasn't it wouldn't make much of a difference - some art styled enable you to make more out of the hardware, but they do not provide better performance automatically (if anything, if done naively a non-photorealistic art style can actually be worse).

More performance sensitive but also more constrained. Balances out as long as you're not doing anything silly.