This is the actual truth. Revisiting the catalog of early cross platform games and it's evident that Sony engineers couldn't get anything running well on there for the first three years of its lifespan. The same games ran just fine on the Xbox360.
It's actually great to develop for. It was an early glimpse of fixed-size vector units, and to a lesser extent, general-purpose shaders.
What sucks is trying to do anything for it on any other hardware, or vice-versa.
There's a reason PS3 exclusives looked gorgeous and ran smoothly right out the gate. There's also a reason half of them remain PS3 exclusives, two decades later.