Nothing new here. Consoles in terms of game development have advantage to have only one set of hardware, so you can optimize pedal to the metal for it and get max out. Often also they have more direct hardware access, which helps a lot too. Hence why they can sometimes punch above what raw hardware power would suggest. But that is well known even before.
And the other thing was Microsoft even sending their people over to help them. Something tells me this played quite big role. And dunno if it is standard or just special thing some developers get. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for MS and Sony helping developers to make their games run better and get most out of the systems. Usually through generation, developers get better and better, so games at the end of generation look nicer and are more ambitious since developers got good at extracting every bit of performance out of console. But something also tells me this isn’t exactly viable for everyone.