I remember the older driving games. They'd progressively "build" the road as you progressed on it. Curves in the road were drawn as straight line segments.
Which wasn't a problem, but it clearly showed how the programmers improvised to make it perform.
Limiting the drawing distance and rendering as little geometry as possible is absolutely still a thing, devs just can afford to hide it better these days. The golden rule of graphics programming has always been "cheat as much as you can get away with, and then a bit more".
Which wasn't a problem, but it clearly showed how the programmers improvised to make it perform.