> It's much easier to optimize for the known hardware configuration of a console than for "all PCs".
Sometimes with significant quality downgrades, I remember texture quality of early Skyrim being abyssal because the whole game was console optimized. On the other hand there is cyberpunk which apparently didn't even reliably run on some of the consoles it was released on, no idea if it was because of released date agreements or if it was just a shitty money grab.
As far as I understand the great upside of consoles in the past was that the manufacturers strictly vetted the quality of games you could release for them. There have been a few "scandals" where they obviously rescinded those controls to get a game out in time for a specific season only to have it crash and burn. Not sure how strict the controls are now, do they still vet the games strictly or is it just an app store with minimal quality checks?