The devs over there were able to create an engaging and fun game on a constrained budget, using a combination of various unity assets, in house design and modelling and a lot of attention to detail (especially with animations), which ran exceptionally well for an early access release.
An AAA studio with the same limitations applied would likely not have made anything close
TIL. It makes a little more sense why Ubisoft just declared a game as AAAA - they spent a lot of money on it. It didn’t mean we as gamers get a better experience