This is not true in my experience. Cranking out code is obviously the bottleneck, unless you have the luxury of working on a very narrow problem. The author describes a multi-modal project that does not afford this luxury.

Unless you're also writing your own graphics and game engine from scratch, if you're making a truly novel and balanced game, then it should not be possible to crank out code with AI. When working in engines, the bulk of the work is usually in gameplay programming so the fact that its code is so predictable should be concerning (unless the programming is effectively in natural language). Not spending most of your time testing introduced mechanics, re-balancing and iterating should be triggering alarm bells. If you're working on an RPG, narrative design, reactivity and writing will eat up most of your time.

In the case you're working as part of team large enough to have dedicated programmers, the majority of the roles will usually be in content creation, design and QA.

IMO, looking at most budget spend, it's the art & content that is the bottleneck.

And it’s absolutely true in my experience, coding was never the bottleneck (modulo advanced shader programming which LLMs still aren’t great at despite my best efforts)