I said GL for PS2 since it isn't likely to be D3D.
What does that have to do with OpenGL?
A lot of publishers do send staff that do know a fair bit about game development. It just depends on the kinds of games your doing.
I can't recall a single incident in 20 odd years of game development where a publisher has expressed the slightest interest in the language we are using or even looked at ths source code.
The only exception being Rare in the 80's where they insisted we submit source code instead of compiled code. And they weren't a publisher, we were subcontracting.
People throw the term 'AAA' around all the time. Actual triple 'A' games represent a tiny proportion of development so I generally take it just to mean mainstream commercial releases in this context.