I saw a bunch of comments on this one, it seems it's not really true. The left image just looks like someone who kept subdividing the polygons in Blender which is just a two click thing, increases the amount of polygons by a whole lot.
And apparently there was another older joke where people said 2B's butt had more polygons than the whole of Ocarina of Time, which is also very false. The reality is Young Link's polygons is just 1/3rd of that. So yeah, all of this is exaggerated a ton, the more you know.