Yes, I think that's exactly what that comment meant.
I'm sure a 2 man experienced team consisting of a programer and an artist can recreate the vault intro sequence of F3 in a few months. They wouldn't be able to expand thst into the full 2007 game without years of man-hours. Because F3 itself took thousands of man hours. It'd take a lot less time with modern tools, but not enough to offset the work of hundreds of developers.
You're not going to get hundreds of man hours of content for free but setting up Source or Unreal or Unity to get a modern engine with every feature those games had does not take months.
And if it takes one person all that time to build the roughly-equivalent engine, that person does not have time to design and build the game's assets, nor design and playtest the levels.
You do get out what you put in, but one person can only put in so much.
I'm sure a 2 man experienced team consisting of a programer and an artist can recreate the vault intro sequence of F3 in a few months. They wouldn't be able to expand thst into the full 2007 game without years of man-hours. Because F3 itself took thousands of man hours. It'd take a lot less time with modern tools, but not enough to offset the work of hundreds of developers.