A lot of the feedback we get on this topic seems predicated on an assumption that there are two options, and we're basically free to choose between the two, and we chose wrong for some reason. Sometimes that definitely is the case, and sometimes it's reasonable to actually go back and choose differently.
3D vs 2D cutscenes are nothing like this. I feel like sometimes this topic gets unfairly generalised to "2D cutscenes are bad". A lot of the 2D cutscenes were either neutrally or well received. The animated Necromancy intro is pretty universally loved, as far as I can tell.
Really the focus of the ire seems to be on the Extinction scenes which depict epic events. I totally get that it's a bit disappointing to not see them in engine, but I think using words like "shortcut" is a bit of a misunderstanding of the options available.
There is no practical world in which the remaining elder gods, or a scene like Kerapac having an anime battle with an elder god and a shadow leviathan, could ever have been 3D cutscenes. I often wonder if it would have been better to just retcon the end of Sliske's Endgame, either explicitly by editing it, or with a weak justification like "the elder gods went back to sleep off camera and never troubled the world again". Maybe that would have been better, I'm honestly still not sure.
To try and give an idea of the scope, and I'm not an artist so these are not precise time costs:
The 2D cutscenes for Extinction probably took Mod Bak around a month total. That's probably off by a bit but about the right order of magnitude.
By comparison, if we wanted to model and animate the key scenes in Extinction (most notably the Elder Gods descending on Iaia and Kerapac's battle) we're talking something like a year, maybe longer. Five new models would need to be created, each significantly more complex and detailed than any existing boss. Each of those models would need to be completely hand animated, which is something we haven't done for cutscenes for a long time. Nothing resembling the environments depicted in the cutscenes (the shadow breach open wide enough for a leviathan, Iaia being destroyed on a global scale, post destruction annihilated Iaia) exists, so those would also all have to be created - let's roughly estimate another six months for that.
Even if we ignore what could be done instead with those 18 months of art time, we'd have to have started work on the cutscenes some time in late 2020. To my memory, in late 2020 we hadn't even agreed that we were going to be making EGWD and committing to the storyline which eventually became Extinction. (I'd pitched it, but scenes like the battle with the shadow leviathan hadn't even been imagined yet, that came during the development of the quest.)
You might say well, even with what was set up in Endgame, you didn't need to try to tell a story which can't be depicted in 3D, and I think that's fair if that's your priority. If we think about what could be practically accomplished in-engine, we'd have to rewrite parts of the story to accommodate it. This would look something like:
There is no shadow leviathan (since no such model exists, and re-using the Crassian Leviathan probably wouldn't convey the scale very well). We rewrite the story so that the battle is between Jas and Kerapac. This would probably have to take place in Jas's chamber from Endgame, as that model is very awkward to fit in anywhere else. (We actually tried to have her appear in the world on Mah's plateau, but we couldn't get it to work as the environment and model just didn't work well together.) The battle would have to be something like the two firing beams at each other, as the existing Jas model (and creature concept) isn't really built to physically move.
The scene with the Elder Gods would just have to take place off camera, and you'd be told about it in dialogue by Seren afterwards. We'd have to somehow rework the story or the way the ending works so that you never see the baby Elder Gods or destroyed Iaia. (I did try to get baby Elder Gods made, maybe as pets, but EGWD in general had so much art going on that I couldn't make it happen.)
If you think that sounds better, and that a smaller scale event which is depicted in engine is better than a large scale event which can only be depicted in 2D, then I think that's a perfectly valid opinion, and I would say we've basically listened to that feedback. One of our key storytelling priorities right now is to not promise story points which don't make sense in-engine, because that would just create the same problem again.
To answer the original question though: Yes, it's too large for a game jam project. It's closer in size to a skill than it is to something like Osseous.
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