There's an artistic thread in game coding - one that isn't the norm, but which I think RCT is exemplary of - that holds that mechanical sympathy is important to the game design process. A limit set around NPOT maximums and divisions and lengths of pathfinding is allowing the machine to opine, "you will actually do less work if you set the boundary here". Setting those limits tends to inform the shape of resulting assets as something tiny and easy to hardcode.

The thing that changed during the 90's is that mechanical sympathy became optional to achieving a large production. The data input defining the game world was decoupled into assets authored in disconnected ways and "crunched down" to optimized forms - scans, video, digital painting, 3D models. RCT exhibits some of this, too, in that it's using PCM audio samples and prerendered sprites. If the game weren't also a massive agent simulator it would be unremarkable in its era. But even at this time more complex scripting and treating gameplay code as another form of asset was becoming normalized in more genres.

From the POV of getting a desired effect and shipping product, it's irrelevant to engage with mechanical sympathy, but it turns out that it's a thing that players gradually unravel, appreciate and optimize their own play towards if they stick with it and play to competitive extremes, speedrun, mod, etc.

The 64kb FPS QUOD released earlier this year is a good example of what can happen by staying committed to this philosophy even today: the result isn't particularly ambitious as a game design, but it isn't purely a tech demo, nor does it feel entirely arbitrary, nor did it take an outrageous amount of time to make(about one year, according to the dev).