That's the same conclusion I reached here. I also think when you pause (i.e. hit escape, not talking live pause where the sim keeps running), the game continues to render the full scene in the background, even though there's content in front. This just feels wasteful to me - the power delta on my GPU between active and idle is something like 100 W!
The intro sequence is a pre-rendered video - I reckon if Asobo used a pre-rendered hangar video, they could swap that out in a patch and nobody would notice or care, but it would knock GPU utilisation to < 5%.
