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I don't know what the first such example was, but Killzone Shadow Fall had it in multiplayer.

It did, but the concept predates last gen. Halo 3 did something in that space, and tricks exploiting MSAA to reconstruct resolution details date even farther back, possibly as far as the original XBox. Sure - it's primitive by modern standards, but it was steps that paved the way.

Speaking of which - as a fun tidbit - a lot of modern Temporal image treatment (both AA and reconstruction) could be backported to the PS3/360 gen consoles - hardware was capable of it, it just hasn't been invented in time. It's not well publicised - but the first console game to feature a variant of TAA was on PSP (GT Portable).

Seems they were right to laugh, since you’re unable to show how the PS4 Pro was a ‘glimpse into the future’.

Well it was the first HW to introduce Variable Resolution Render targets (not the weird driver hacks PC vendors attempted before - the real thing). While not 1:1 - VRS emulates the concept at shading level, and extends it to be more granular (which helps with useability). And everything has VRS now, even PS5 Pro - so yea, that was a glimpse ;P

Just remembered the Xbox 360 was using hardware to upscale to target resolution. Do that count?

That's upscaling with filters - not reconstruction. While a related space, it wouldn't really count. Use of it in realtime dates all the way back into 90ies and first bi-linear filtering capable GPUs.

I don’t get it. Why would any game be built around RT and ML when the PS5 has to support them and it’s not especially good at either? When will that begin exactly?

I mean - ML will continue in cosmetic use obviously, but we might just see more than just using it for image treatment.
There's a lot of cosmetics one could do - NVidia Apex style - that would then only run on that one console but not break the game on base. And PC ports could also benefit from that - at least for NVidia GPU users.