That “look” has more to do with studios just using the standard shaders and default settings that come with Unreal. Using a different engine wouldn’t really solve this, as they would probably just lean on whatever that engine’s defaults are. Any studio that wants to can write their own shaders to give their game a more unique look.

The engine inherited problems that stick out to me are traversal stutter and shader compilation stutter. These are both products of engine limitations that are difficult for developers to work around.