I think the 1,235 number is inflated. It could credit people that did minimal work or that are part of teams like Sony publishing and QA that are thanked as a group.
Say we have direct and indirect costs of $300 per head per day (which is low, normally you would say £400 or so per head).
This would be about $8 Million or so per month.
It's the game credits, numbers aren't inflated. In most cases the real number is higher because normally in several outsourcing companies for areas like art or localization only bosses or producers are creadited, and not the lower level workers who do the work itself.
I doesn't mean that these 1200+ people worked on the game during 8 years or a huge portion of i, only a very small portion of them did (Arrowhead heads, designers, heads of department). Many of them (Sony some executitves, PR, voice over, motion capture, localization, concept artists, music, audio, CG artists...) work on it during maybe only some weeks or months, others only during maybe around a third of the project (coders and artists hired for the big push when there's the production peak, testers...).
I assume it had a budget of around $100-$150M, which would include base post launch content (to be expanded due to the success) and base server costs budget (that may already have spent because is being way more successful than expected) for the first year.
AAAA would be starting at around 3 times this amount of people. So games like Spider-Man 2, Halo Infinite, Starfield, Diablo IV, Far Cry 6, Skull & Bones and pretty likely Beyond Good & Evil 2 and GTA6.