Realistically, what happened last time around is far more relevant than counting all the older examples. PC in the past 10 years has rapidly grown. It is a different market entirely compared to in the 2000s or the 90s where there were constant articles about "the death of PC gaming" and such. We know those no longer crop up because Steam daily and monthly active users for example have continued to be extremely healthy and it likely lifts up all boats up to some extent as well (the other PC clients, like Origin) as well.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...-stream-users/
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...y-active-users
It is why after all those years that Madden is back on PC compared to when they stopped after Madden 08. The market is different and not really comparable to what PC gaming used to be, especially in terms of accessibility (still not quite 100% plug and play like consoles of course).
You can check the major publishers (EA, Activision, Take Two, Ubisoft, etc) quarterly earnings calls where they have slides that show PC revenue splits compared to consoles have grown as well. PC used to be treated as afterthought and while that hasn't completely gone away, it's heavily minimized.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, FIFA and NBA 2K made the jump after only a year last time around which was significant progress. That time it did not take years and years (I think to some degree especially on forums, people say things without the fully story and it gets passed around as automatic truth).
That said, I don't entirely disagree... and none of it matters if a lot of players do not have solid state storage for example. In the general hardware front, it could be argued last time around, most PC players were also not ready for NBA 2K15 and FIFA 15, but it still happened (resolution plays into it too on the performance side, newer consoles run sports titles at 4K, but plenty of PC players choose to stick to 1080p based on the steam hardware survey, and *far* less pixels to render means absolute top end hardware not required)
It does make sense why this happened but I'm still hopeful for NBA 2K22 PC version.