I've tried writing this tweet out a few different times but it's hard to get this point across in this manner. Pressing on how conservative you have to be on polycounts to students is more of a hinderance. Let me get more indepth with this.
Add extra geo if it avoids small tris which cause overdraw. Just be reasonable with it basically and keep it within a ball park if it's not on mobile/VR. The real shit I want to know is how many UV sets you have, vertex colours, reversed index buffer, adjacency buffer etc?