as someone who has hacked a ton of games: yes this is how they are.
Games that have shipped are full of terrible hacks. often they're marked as such! if you've got comments, you'll often see shit like "// fix this before we ship" and the game shipped 20 years ago, and the hack is still there.
It's gotten slightly better since the 90s? We used to have to hack around basic missing pieces of the game engine. Like, Duke Nukem 3D has a lie in the first screen you see:
You see the little shadow around that roof bit in the middle?
This engine doesn't support world shadows. There's engine support for shadows under enemies, yes, but not on the world. Duke3D came out in January 1996, and Quake was high anticipated and only a few months away, and guess what? it supported world shadows! It had a whole lighting engine!
See? World shadows! The torch on the way leaves a shadow under it, and that column casts a shadow, and Duke Nukem 3D's BUILD engine supports zero of that. So... why is there a shadow there?
If you open the level in the editor, you'll find that the shadow is defined as a sector. You see, the engine DOES allow you to manually set the brightness level for floors/ceilings.
So they just made the level designers manually put shadows in. For every bit of the world that should have a shadow, manually draw a sector the shape of the shadow, then darken it a few shades. There you go, shadows. Did this take a massive amount of work? Probably! but it meant they looked like they had a feature they didn't.
Railroad Tycoon saves games by taking a screenshot of the map. Commander Keen scrolls the screen by redrawing the edges of items and then actually redrawing it every 8 pixels. Wolfenstein 3D figures out when two columns of the screen next to each other have the same colors and draws them at the same time, because it was faster on these ancient video cards. 3D Movie Maker has "full 3D backgrounds" that are actually just a flat picture, but they appear 3D because they also do some trickery with a depth-buffer. Half-Life has a tram with a door that can open, something the Gold-Src engine can't do, by having two copies of the tram level (one with a door and one with a tram) and having a loading point after the tram stops moving.
Games are always hacks at some level. They always have been! They probably always will be.
We only know about these hacks because they're in games that shipped. The beautiful hack-free games that are architecturally pure in their design? They probably never got finished.
So yeah. Don't be afraid to fake what you can't do in your creative endeavors. Chances are, no one will ever notice, and the few weirdos who do (like me) will think you're a genius for doing it.
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