While games can have that Unreal 5 look and feel, I think for less than the cost of building and maintaining a custom engine, a dev team could sufficiently customize UE5 to still achieve a more game-specific feel. I expect we'll get this in The Witcher IV.
I'd also point to downsides beyond cost in using custom, in-house engines: e.g., the buggy launch of Cyberpunk 2077, the loading screens and on-planet world-segments in Starfield.
Lastly, as a dev-cost issue, this is related to one of my chief issues: the HUGE amount of dev effort that goes into lighting solutions. As functional ray tracing tech becomes more and more mass-market, at some point (maybe games like Indiana Jons and Doom Eternal are already there) games will be able to require RT-capable hardware and leave out the whole development phase for building the lighting components. Scenes will just be illuminated via path tracing by the local hardware.
If you combine using a standard engine (whether UE5 or something else) plus eliminating thousands of hours of custom lighting, that's a lot more time for a dev team to focus on the game. And that's the biggest win for all of us.
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