I wish companies would just opensource really old engines for educational purposes.

Maybe take game assets resize everything to 1/10th so that it looks like sht but can still be used as placeholder.

Would boost the pipeline of talent for the entire industry

You can take a look at Amazon Lumberyard which is free. It's based on CryEngine, which is behind Far Cry.

Note that Lumberyard became "Open 3D Engine" (yes, very inspired name) which is Apache 2 licensed:

https://o3de.org/

https://github.com/o3de/o3de/

AFAIK all development in Lumberyard has ceased and moved to O3DE.