It definitely is a meme. Cuphead, Hearthstone, Ori, Cities Skylines, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Subnautica, Hollow Knight... There's a bunch of great games made with the engine that I've never seen issues with, many of these games are performance sensitive as well.

Edit: Maybe you could provide a few examples of games with those issues?

Games like Cuphead or Hollow Knight I wouldn’t call AAA games.

Cities Skyline is the poster child (well besides KSP) of Unity Jankiness. Just look at how many mods there to fix basic things in Skyline.

Ok. Sure, those are games made by small teams. Still, they have a high degree of polish and depend on good, consistent performance because the combat requires precision.

I suspect that KSP is janky because of KSP (or because it was built on a very old Unity and ported over across many engine versions.)

I agree. Quite a few times was I surprised to find out a game uses Unity. But the better ones usually don't show a big Unity splash screen. Return of the Obra Dinn was on I totally expected to be its own engine.

But yeah, AAA games usually have specific requirements better satisfied by a custom engine.

"Subscription limitations

The Unity Pro and Plus subscriptions have no limitations to customization of the Unity Splash Screen.

The Unity Personal subscription has the following limitations:

    The Unity Splash Screen cannot be disabled.
    The Unity logo cannot be disabled."

I wonder how much the logo displaying has an impact on your perception of the game.

https://store.unity.com/ - I think these prices have changed since Unity first appeared.

Logo: Some

The abomination that is the Unity launcher: Very much.

I've played plenty of games both ways, and as a developer I have to agree with something I've heard before - The reason that so many Unity games have "cartoony graphics" or performance issues is because Unity is one of the easiest game engines to learn (also cartoony graphics are one of the easiest styles to achieve because of it's inherit lack of details).

So you end up with more asset flips, unexperienced devs, etc. on the Unity engine than say the Unreal engine.

"Meme" doesn't mean "false" or "exaggerated" but it seems that's how you took it.

1. An element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.

2. An image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations.