Updating your engine is not a new system. Unreal 4 to 5 is a new system but thats not what this Unity update is about.
Lets go a bit deeper here, since I miss pontificating about ART.
Let me introduce you to the term “budget” which is an industry standard and we made the mistake of using it once to describe something in the game, making everyone feel like we were talking about $$$. When you make a game you have “x” amount of space and time to put stuff in, if you go over, things break, run slowly, cause delays, game wont even start, etc. Thats called your budget. What determines that budget? Your hardware, your dev team and your engine, pretty much in that order. SWGOH runs on very old devices that cant really do much so it puts a hard cap on the budget, those are called min spec devices and they're the biggest reason why an old game cant have all this fancy tech sh*t new games do have, because new games typically care very little about the min spec the 5 year old competition cares about.
For SWGOH, I noticed last year we dropped a number of min spec devices so I asked the tech team if that opened enough budget for our characters to have a new maximum number of polys. We made some tests, they were good so then we decided that on characters that were worth it we would go with a more detailed model, up to 3x more detailed as far as polys go. One thing we couldn't do though was raise our texture sizes, those had to stay the same which is why when some youtuber decides to zoom 300x on Reys face, it doesn't look great because that texture is meant to be seen at game size on a mobile phone, not enhanced like a CSI crime scene. Even with all those changes, our new, highest quality characters were at half the spec of MSF but we were happy with the new direction.
The term budget is also typically used when referring to the combination of available time and resources to make something. For example, making a unique animation for every character in the Journey Guide would have put us over budget for that feature because it would have meant way too much work for the time we had available. Instead we opted for having them be added into the game at a slower pace we could commit to. Every single game you have ever played goes through that process on a daily basis.
What about the engine then? In general terms, updates can make things run smoother, yes, but an infrastructure needs to be built, its not automatic. Lets say the new update comes with a new renderer, thats exciting. One reason MSF looks great is because of how the characters are rendered and the lights we use in SWGOH are very old (load up our characters in a modern 3D software, use the fancy render settings and they look stellar but in our game with the legacy lights they get blown the hell out). Anyways, we couldn't just flip a switch and all the lights in the game get changed, no, first you gain access to the new renderer via update but then you need a commitment to rebuild your entire shader pipeline in the entire game around a new lighting system. That would require a massive change in the budget because suddenly your tech artist, vfx, env and character artists have to focus on that task for a number of months along with a few engineers and high level approval as well ... It would be a massive commitment and not easy to justify at all, not when it cant interrupt the release of new characters and events, which take considerable time.
Updating an engine is nice because if you have a problem trying to get something to work you'll have more ways to do it in legit ways instead of having to hack it, you'll have better support from Unity, you'll have access to more modern tools to make new stuff like fancier vfx settings or an integrated cinematics system. When you get into the grind of making stuff for the next release, be it relics, GL’s, or Heroes Journeys, its easy to de-prioritize updating the engine that makes it all happen. Think of it like your kitchen, a new fancy kitchen would allow you to make much fancier food in theory but you still need to build it, get used to it and learn how to use all the stuff it comes with before you can level up your cooking skills. That all makes sense but at the same time you could go “why get a new kitchen when I can make all this tasty food with the kitchen I have” That same thought applies to engines and its a difficult balancing act.
Long winded answer to what could be summed up to “lol it aint like that” but I think the conversation level in this sub can level up a bit if people become a bit more acquainted with how making games actually works and seeing the discourse in the last month, most everyone here knows very little about game engines.
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