You are trying to comfort yourself with your purchase which is ok but the issue with your comment is that you are assuming your edge case scenarios are a generality .
-Not everyone runs a Ryzen CPU and even from those who do not everyone is on 3000 or 5000 series ( many peoples still on 2000 series ) last but not least not everyone runs a 500 series mobo , i would argue vast mojority is on 300-400series . This is why Hardware Unboxed don't enable SAM , not because ''it's an advantage with AMD'' but because it's an edge case scenario !
- ''It plays every game i have tries flawlessly at 1080p'' is not arguement . What games at what resolution what framerates and what graphical settings ? Point being your personal requirements are not universal , what appears flawless to you might appear very flawed to others .
- Brushing away all the advantages that the RX580 offers over the 6500XT just because of the lack of HDMI 2.1 seems dubious at best. Again you are emphasising a very edge case scenario which makes no sense for most peoples , what is the interest in pairing a 120Hz 4K TV with a 6500XT to have your games run at 1080p , don't forget that the 6500XT is nowhere near acheiving 120fps with high quality settings even at 1080p .
Well they include it now don't they?
Ok let's put some context into this, I had built a HTPC using the 5600G. It was nice but still an APU. My company give us a $500 credit to buy anything we wanted for our home office (Working from home) so I put it towards a Hisense U8G which is a QLED 4K 120 HZ TV that has 2 HDMI 2.1 ports. Since I have plenty of AMD cards I put in my Strix RX570 8GB GPU and though the Gaming was nice it did not give me what I wanted as I could not enable VRR to avoid stutters and slowdowns as 60HZ was locked. How many CPUs did Lisa Su they have sold when they announced AM5?
The memory bandwidth on the 580 is 256 GB/s vs 144.2 so it is faster but the boost clock of the 570/580 is no higher than 1500 MHZ. The 6500XT will run at 2958 MHZ all day long. So the pixel fill rate on the 580 is 42.88 GP/s while the 6500XT is 90.1. Perhaps that explains why the card feels faster than Polaris. Unless I am playing Cyberpunk or Doom Eternal (yes I have that too) the 4GB buffer has no effect in performance at 1080P. If the VRR range is from 45-120 HZ what does it matter what the ultimate frame rates are? Unless I am getting poor framerates I run every Game at it's native settings the only thing I do is enable 1080P. I can say that the 6500XT is just as fast as the laptop 5800H/3060 in most Games and faster in some. Yes I do have a 3060 laptop to back up my statement.
OK let's put the Gaming in context; Victor Vran, Just Cause 4, TWWH2, TWWH3, Dues Ex, Forza 5, Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Everspace 2, Jedi Fallen Order, The Division 2. Civ 6, Baldur's Gate 3, Outriders (Worldslayer), Warhammer Chaos Gate, Grim Dawn, Project Cars 2&3, Specs OP the Line, Starship Troopers, Orcs Must Die 3 and a few others. I have 748 owned Games in GOG Galaxy and have been subscribing to Humble Choice since it launched so there are probably just as many Games in my Humble Account that I have not claimed yet. Before you jump on me I subbed Netflix for Humble and that $12 a month is quite sweet.
I read and watched reviews of the 6500XT and was interested in exploring if the lack of encoder and VRAM that Youtube postulated as a big negative actually made a difference. Then I remembered that every this has missing can be done by the CPU. As I said I got one new for $219.99 in an environment where the only other viable cards would have been 3060, 6600 but those were all double the price or more. Color me impressed when the card fully supported HDMI 2.1 on my TV. The funny thing is when i took the card apart to explore the die I cannot think of a smaller die that gives the type of performance it does. Of course the sentiment will make the 6500XT less desirable but thank you for the opinion that allowed me to buy a brand new GPU for less than $200 US. If I was going to use edge case I also enjoy the memory bus as adding my RAID 0 NVME card makes no difference but all of my storage in that machine are connected to the CPU.