They have a very complicated and robust pipeline that generates all of those LODs automatically. The artists aren't manually creating them.
replyArtists did generate a lot of those lods. At the very least they had to hand tune a lot of them. Look at the sheer quality of some of these:
replyhttps://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphi...
Another game that I find has very impressive draw distance is Just Cause 2. You can see objects very far away when flying etc, but they look very detailed and do not change when moving closer. Definitely blew me away the first time playing it.
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