The fact that developers have to cater to multiple platforms that have hardware limitations and different operating systems has led to worse quality of games of time. Console exclusives are anti-competitive, monopolistic, and they lead to a terrible consumer experience.
It’s not like if consoles stopped existing then developers would solely target top-end PCs. They will target as large an audience as they can, unless paid to stay exclusive. Most games these days use a pre-made engine that already targets multiple platforms, so it’s not as difficult to port to multiple platforms as before.
This is a great point. If you want to know what the target hardware becomes if you remove consoles from the picture you can go look at the Steam survey. The typical gaming PC is a 6 core Intel machine with a Gforce 3060 and 16 gigs of Ram pushing a 1080p monitor and running Windows 10. And that’s up from the old top GPU, the 1650, which currently sits at number three on the charts.
That, you’ll notice, is worse than the current spec for modern consoles. It’s also why the huge PC hits in history have looked like LoL, World of Warcraft or Minecraft, not like Crysis and Cyberpunk 2077.
Consoles are why you get Alan Wake 2 on PC instead of the Alan Wake model from Fortnite.