When Zelda: TOTK came out and everyone was goin' nuts about the physics, I wrote a Twitter thread about the state of physics in video games, which I'll put below because it's interesting. In the thread, I allude to (and request not to be @'d by) a PhysX Guy, a specific guy who worked on PhysX who always materialises on Twitter to make pedantic defenses of PhysX to anyone who thinks PhysX sucks (which it does).
Anyway, I only just noticed that in response to the thread, this guy registered a whole new Twitter account just to address the thread, and what he reckons are misconceptions about PhysX, although functionally they aren't, as he's had explained to him a billion times. I completely missed this whole thing until like 8 months later! Anyway, I thought I would boost it now because he put the work in and got zero engagement back.
Here's the thread copied into Cohost for preservation
Can't stress enough that the physics being amazing in TOTK is because of Nintendo paying for Havok. It's the same reason No Man's Sky has the best Barrel Rolling Down A Hill and HL2 had the best Blow Up A Bunch Of Crates With A Grenade. Most games use something cheaper and worse. Half-Life Alyx also has extremely good physics, it's not Havok but Valve's own thing called Rubikon made partly by, I'm told, ex-Havok folks.
Unreal 5 has a new physics engine called Chaos, which started rough but is now getting pretty Havoky. 99% of stuff on Unreal or Unity uses an old version of PhysX that the PhysX guy who always materialises when I talk about this reckons both companies did a bad job implementing. For whatever reason, PhysX in Unreal and Unity sucks, but gets used by everyone because it's free. Everyone whose gameplay doesn't rely on physics, that is! Because it's unreliable. Mostly if a game requires you to stand on a physics object to progress, it's not PhysX.
Rocket League is on Unreal, but they implemented a third party physics solution called Bullet because it's not feasible to have cars punt a ball around in multiplayer with PhysX (caveat for That Guy: I'm sure it is in your ideal environment nobody really has access to).
BOTW also had amazing physics; you could stand on a ball! Shit never went through other shit! You could stasis-smash shit real hard into other shit no problem! Havok baby. PhysX, you can't let something spin too fast or it'll freak out. (do not @ me, PhysX guy).
So if you wondered why for a while around HL2, it was "oh my god, physics gameplay is the future" and then it wasn't, it's because for a minute, the only physics available was Expensive-But-Good and as soon as Shitty-But-Free was available everyone went for that. It took everything HL2 did off the table, but you could have a ton of impressive but basically cosmetic physics happening and it didn't cost you anything. So 20 years later we get what is basically the next game to lean real heavy on physics, and it's Havok again.