Very well put.
To expand on this a bit because I am bored. The way most game engines work and have done since forever is that every asset in a game is a thing. And as a developer one can than take that thing and copy it all over the game how ever many times one wants with the full freedom to rotate, move, scale etc. the copy. But when it comes to actually storing the result on your hard drive all those copies aren't. Instead they are each a piece of code that contains a shortcut to the original and the additional data about the tweaks done to it.
In other words a beach is just a single grain of sand and a hundred trillion shortcuts to that grain of sand. So when it's stored on your hard drive the entire beach only takes up as much room as a single grain of sand.
This game however uses images which means that there are no shortcuts. Every grain of sand on that beach is a distinct pixel or number of pixels on that image. And as far as your hard drive is concerned that means you are basically writing down the information for that beach one grain of sand at a time.
Now, there are good reasons to do things this way of course from the development side. It's just a tradeoff with hard drive space.
