I kind of wish that games would have a way to “auto-profile” various settings. Like, take a sample of potentially problematic in-game scenes, toggle settings one at a time, spend an hour or something running through rendering them while the player does something else, and indicate their peak FPS impact on your particular system.

Games do often have a mechanism to try ramping down through quality presets until they hit one that hits a pre-chosen FPS target and recommends that preset, but that doesn’t try flipping all the switches. On the dev side, that should be a small amount of effort to add above-and-beyond “try all the presets”.

Another benefit is that if you use mods, that would adapt to it. If you, say, use a mod that converts a lot of lights from being non-shadow-casting to be shadow-casting, a popular change to make in earlier Bethesda games, that would take that into account in showing performance impact of, say, a change in the shadow quality setting, whereas a preset set of decisions would not.