Yeah, it's unintuitive that more people = slower, as most people have never hit that level of scale. But it means teams and managers and communication communication communication.

Will Wright said that you go from 4 hours of work per hour of meetings to 1 hour of work per 4 hours of meetings. This can be scaled down with wikis and tools. Chinese companies tend to have "living documentation" aka system analysts - a person whose job is to understand everything and be asked questions whenever someone gets stuck. Western companies are very resistant to this model for some reason.

Bethesda is another way to build things at scale. Lots of isolated sections that don't link into the main thing. But it's hard to build something like Fallout 2 that way when the whole story isn't in one person's head.

Part of the reason for so many layoffs recently is because it works. It's a magic tool that increases speed and reduces costs, and you just pay for it with everyone's motivation and soul.