You are forgetting that you have to pay to play online. Your $500 console is an $800 console if you use it for 5 years. You can build a roughly PS5 equivalent PC (RX 6700) for more like $650-700 which is less overall.

Plus it's a computer so you can also use it for normal computer things, and the games themselves are generally much cheaper with a huge backlog and sales all the time.