Thinking about user seeing pixels is seeing just a part of the picture. As all software projects you don't optimize just for immediate user experience but also development time.
Time to first draw rarely coincides with development time.
I use unreal professionally. I would say that unreal is very opinionated in the way things are done. This is a good thing if you can stick to it and know how to leverage the systems in the way they were intended but makes it also makes it incredibly easy to shoot yourself in the foot by not adhering to the (sometimes unwritten) rules.
I would be interested in knowing how this compares to Epic Online Services (EOS). We use EOS for connecting P2P lobbies and doing server browsing.
When using unreal that service is basically free. Managing game servers is of course not part of the EOS package but it's a big question if your game really needs dedicated servers or could do with p2p lobbies. Running your own servers is quite expensive after all.
Also console support is also always a concern for us so whether they check all the boxes so we can use them inside the console ecosystem would be very important to know.