For soft shadows, I tried several different techniques but ended up settling on PCF because it has less visual artifacts than other methods. This site has it too: https://www.ogldev.org/www/tutorial42/tutorial42.html

I designed the game to hopefully be within my abilities to comprehensively test and ship - there are few players on 1 single-threaded server for a world, there's a limited way that they can interact with the world, and the planets are handmade with specific bounds. Nothing is infinite and I can easily test the limits of the game. I'm also not going to launch multiplayer until I'm certain that it's stable and I've hopefully solved every known bug.

With many of the bigger games, it's almost impossible to test all the different ways you can hit their limits, and they have tighter timelines where they launch with many known bugs. They may also apply a business mindset to it e.g. if it's a bug that only affects 0.1% of players, it won't affect revenue much regardless of how gamebreaking the bug is, and they may be willing to just let it be.