I think this is a fair take; I personally would rather have a laptop with the bottom tier 5 series since I'd be able to pretty much any game, use whatever controllers, run emulators, use it for college classes, and watch stuff without advertising.

I think Sony USA played themselves; it's not completely just about the digital only stuff, it's an expensive toy that serves one or two purposes. Ask yourself, at the current price is it even worth getting for a few games?

In my opinion there hasn't been a reason to buy a console in at least a decade. People bought them anyway.

Not quite. Price of entry has always been cheaper and that's not going to change anytime soon. Sure, consoles next gen are going to cost more but so do PC components and ports are infamously unoptimized. People in tech savvy communities also underestimate the value of a mostly plug and play experience.

Well other than the current cost of building 😭 but that is going to pass on to also be a problem for the next gen consoles too

Next up: having a PC with offline games will be deemed piracy

Yesterday: "you wouldn't download a car"

Tomorrow: "you wouldn't drive your own car"

The public are idiots, consumption will continue.

This is theoretically true of everything under capitalism. However, it's not the only force involved.

On the system designer's side, unless there is a MASSIVE drop in sales directly attributable to the absence of a particular feature, not including that feature decreases cost which increases profit. Any company that tries to court the minority who like the feature will either have to cut into their profits or charge enough to cover the feature, which will effectively price out a section of the buyers from affording it. Either way, that's probably a lot of money lost. That extra money the other companies gets can be put toward marketing, which in turn shrinks the market share for the feature-focused manufacturer even further, which nets them less money, which... You get the idea. It's the same thing that happened in American health insurance. The companies that did all the things Americans hate used their profits to run the companies that didn't into the ground. Now, all that's left are the ones with which people are familiar.

On the consumer side, they can only choose from what actually is available. Consoles are just shitty computers for people who don't want to learn to 'do computers.' The options are brand A, brand B, and brand C. That's it. You can't demand a console that lets you play games from all three. It doesn't exist. You can't get the one with a cup holder. It doesn't exist. If it's not available as an option, you can't do a write-in vote like it's a ballot. You take what's available, because the alternative is being left alone with your own thoughts and facing off against the FOMO millions of dollars in marketing has built regarding the latest flagship products.