I’ve done all three: worked in corps, am a dev, and have done some games dev early career.
When you dev something, it’s a miracle anything works. All modern software is a giant Jenga pile. When a large project rolls out the door, the feeling is never “oh wow let’s flex on these peasants”, it’s more like “my shit sucks oh god when will it break but try it out and see what you think”.
If I was on the Bethesda team, I would actually be very interested in trying to get feedback from the only other group of devs that remotely know what it’s like to do something similar. What approaches did they take? What’s similar? What’s different? Did the choices that other team make lead to a better product? How much more elegant is their code?
The only people who ruin goodwill like that are overzealous IP lawyers.
No, it’s seen as cloudy and rainy.