Why Destiny 2: Season of the Haunted's Recycled Content is Not an Issue

gamerant.com:

Destiny 2's Season of the Haunted has been live for a little over 24 hours, and there are many reasons why it has the potential to be one of the best seasonal releases in a while. For starters, Seasons generally don't add a new patrol zone, which is instead something that's reserved for big yearly expansions. An example is how Destiny 2's The Witch Queen introduced Savathun's Throne World for players to explore and complete various quests, alongside the new campaign. Season of the Haunted does that as well, and it also brings on the Solar 3.0 update.

Season of the Haunted technically takes place on the Moon, the location that was added to the game with the Shadowkeep DLC, but instead of having players explore the lunar grounds over and over, Bungie gave new life to the old Leviathan spaces from vanilla Destiny 2. This fact alone was enough to stir some controversies among fans due to the Leviathan being now considered a reused asset to give players the impression that new original content was added, instead. While Season of the Haunted does make use of some recycled assets, Bungie is not recycling content to reduce the workload on the team, but rather because it makes sense story-wise.

Destiny 2: How to Get Opulent Keys and Where to Find Opulent Chests

Recycling existing assets is a common thing to do in game development because it allows companies to create new environments and even enemies just by giving new life to parts and features that are already there. This is not something lazy to do, but rather it's often a necessity to steer clear of the crunch culture. On top of that, it also means that the team is still going to rework those assets in different ways, which does take away a substantial amount of development