The critique can be easily flipped though, if you can easily afford it, why tolerate less functionality at higher power draw.
Yes and no. For those who can't be bothered with any settings/setup consoles are very user friendly, but for people who would need a desktop anyways, the cost is more than made up for by pc's being useful for so much more, while consoles are just an entertainment black hole, never mind console game prices.
A pc is your car, a console is a jet ski.
Most people do not need a desktop and it's a stupid buy. Unless you are doing editing, rendering, or have a reason to run a ton of VMs a desktop is a very very very bad buy. And if you do all that, odds are you have one at work that stomps what you have at home. Which is why more and more people are moving to laptops which unless you are doing said work loads is just a smarter and more practicle choice.
Most PC gamers aren't bothering with settings and setup either. This isn't the late 90s. Everything auto configures itself, things turbo boost, RAM has profiles it's plug and play in the silliest way possible.
All the arguments for PC gaming have been shot through unless you either need a multi thousand dollar machine at home for work loads which only a tiny portion of the population uses (you doing solidworks, if not LOL), or just simply want to throw thousands up thousands at a machine. The last niche case is your an LOL/DOTA esports types in which case a potato PC works and the cost of video cards doesn't matter.
You sorta have to look where things are moving to as a market. Most people are buying up laptops now, even gamers. Laptops never got hit with the GPU price rack ups even when inflation and shipping issues happened. It was all a minor thing. Consoles are getting closer and closer to higher end desktops beating them in some cases. Desktop is rapidly going into "go ultra high end or go home" and that trend is not changing till the market crashes and PC gaming goes to cloud service based. Trying to fight the PC being first into the cloud is pointless.
youre forgetting one thing.. a keyboard and mouse is superior to any controller lol.
You also cannot multi screen setup on a console browsing the internet while gaming.. actually be on good coms like discord and many many other things. A controller and no real OS is very limiting for stuff
No duel boxing games either. Lots and lots of great games are only on pc as well.
This is all somewhat true and also utterly wrong.
1. For what games? This is a flat out lie. There are games where KBM is better, but there are ways to enable that on a console now. But tons of games are better with an arcade stick, controller, flight stick, racing wheel, and on and on and on. You can use those on the PC as well. But the input device argument has been a dead orse for a while.
2. This is kinda true and yet utterly false for anybody awake. You can totally be on discord on a laptop or a macbook on the side while doing team games on a console. Even a crappy netbook. All while also hearing the console players as well. This combination costs less now than the GPU, CPU, and soon SSD combo to make PC gaming impressive.
3. There are lots and lots of great games that are console exclusive as well.
All these points are sort of null and void unless you are RTS or CS GO at 240hz, or have some 4090 monster with an 800 buck board. I have a monster at home with one box sitting here with 18 cores and a 3090 and I play Quake 1/World on my PC really. The SO and her sisters play Beat Saber VR on it. That's the point of it. And I have hundreds of games on it. Maybe if there's something I really want at 240hz or maybe in ultrawide but that's rare as all hell. I can talk totally fine over Discord even when play on a Switch with people. For Street Fighter or KOF I'm able to play on either the PS or the PC it's just swapping the arcade stick (of which I have a few). I'll take the console exclusives over the PC ones any day at the moment. Demons Souls has been great. I play Elden Ring on the PS5 over the PC. There's also more rampant cheating and hate speach on the PC.