Don't forget the N64. It is a fine machine, but it doesn't sell well enough to get 3rd party ports. Nintendo got out of chasing hardware since then. (Under 33 million)
Xbox Series so far only has 27.7 million combine sales. if N64 was a disaster, what makes the Xbox Series?
That's called "holding back PC gaming". Something PC gamers had hated for decades. You are suggesting that forcing everyone to have the same amount of Ram as the PS4 for another hardware gen is a good thing now?
I'm not suggesting anything, I'm just retelling what is happening. alan wake 2 and frontiers of pandora titles are proof that you can have a game that scales back to 6-8 GB VRAM/Series S and look "fine", and also scale upwards to PS5/12-16 GB VRAM and look great.
if you believe frontiers of pandora or alan wake 2 was held back by series s or 6-8 GB VRAM, well, i don't know what to tell you. for a fact I know both games will load much higher quality textures and allow higher quality lighting if you have more memory budget. but it won't look like garbage n64 soup on 6-8 GB VRAM/Series S either. that is called scalability.
practically, series s + nvidia's insistency on 8 GB VRAM budget just forces devs to have scalability. do you think ps3 held back gta 5? I personally don't think so. it just forced rockstar to make the engine insanely scalable. as a result it is still one of the most played games on PC as well because it still runs fine on a 750ti while looking great on a 970 and of course looking fantastic on a PS5 or 3080 or whatever
pc gamers may hate it, but it is pc gamers who keep buying 8 gb laptops (4060, 4070) and 8 gb desktops (4060, 4060ti). 4060 will probably dethrone 3060 as the most popular GPU in a year or so. any of it make sense? it is proof that at this point it has gone beyond planned obsolescence. 4060 8 GB is proof that nvidia "expects" devs to make their game scalable and don't care about what "pc gamers" want
again though, as I said, NVIDIA does not have any pull on developers to force such scalability. but Microsoft thinks they have but as you see, series s is not a massive success. as such, many developers are channeling their anger. it is why NVIDIA has given 6 gb vram to 1060s and 8 gb vram to 1070s back then. because ps4 had 5.5 gb vram to work with so NVIDIA had to up their game. with Series S in play, they don't have to. blame this on Microsoft. they "think" they have the pull so they did it. they might've done it, ironically, to save 8 GB GPUs in the process. because 8 GB has an insane presence on PC userbase. we just cannot ignore that at this point. you have to consider Microsoft even unified DX12 gdks for xbox and PC. they now think all PCs as "xboxes".
as for devlopers,
a) they can't make their games scalable (understandable, not every game/engine is made for that)
b) they just don't want to because it is not going to be profitable
they probably channel their frustrations through Digital Foundry etc. only reason why DF randomly brings these questions up.