As a gamer, usually even with performance settings, devs usually do their optimizations, then leave in settings for those with high end machines to mess with.
What seems to have happened in 3.2 is that instead of exposing those settings and making them the default, CIG has made them at engine level as the default. This means that no matter what you change in the config file, it can't override what they did at engine level.
I saw a post on another forum where someone was comparing the default config settings in 3.1 to those in 3.2; and there were no meaningful changes there. If CIG had made the changes to the engine settings, they would be in the config file and used as defaults. Typically things like LOD stages aren't easily exposed in config files. So that, as well as the removal of some NPC units, can't be controlled in config files.
Even though it's in alpha, 7 yrs into development, that they are taking these steps now - when they don't even have 1/100th of the game's world built - is a huge Red flag that they've already hit a bottleneck they can't squeeze through with meaningful results. I am going to say it again, those who think that network bind culling and object containing streaming are going to make that much of a difference, don't have a clue.
For all intent and purposes, at this stage, Star Citizen is barely a proof of concept; and is nowhere
near being a vertical slice of the game they promised. This is why, aside from their ability to build the game promised, I have seen no reason to believe that they will ever get an MMO out of this shit-show.
UPDATE:
https://old.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/8x1f7n/usercfg_modifications_to_restore_314s_graphical/
