[wasabi991011]

Your examples are from 10 or more years earlier that Skyrim's creation engine.

That is to say, the older engines could have been limited by hardware requirements, or maybe decoupling physics from fps is an innovation that appeared between 2004 and 2011. Or maybe they are also jank.

Notably, the source 2 engine (2015) decoupled physics from fps (as I understand).

[KK7NIL]

I'd say Skyrim was just around the border where you started to get engines which uncoupled physics from FPS.

This only really matters for competitive games though, so it's not surprising it wasn't prioritized.