It's not "the easy route". Making a game engine is a tremendous investment these days. If you are making anything other than a game that looks like early 2000s or earlier, you need a pretty capable engine that takes years to develop. That's on top of the time it costs to make a game, which is also typically years. Not to mention that your proprietary engine will have subpar tooling and make your game development slower.
For anyone but industry giants it's not feasible to make a modern engine. Unless your game is not aiming to play and feel like a modern game, you have to run with an off-the-shelf engine.