Something can be 'technically superior' but still not the 'best' solution, because 'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'
First to market is a crapshoot; sometimes it makes you the baseline, and sometimes it just gives your competition free market research. This is where Apple lived for a long time; let Microsoft or whoever do something, then do it better.
Well, in this case, a distinct lack of needing to compile shaders.
And consoles have been 'PCs in fancy cases' since the OG Xbox. Arguably the Dreamcast.
Buy the S2 now, while they're still working through their existing backlog of stock.
I bought a PS5Pro when the word 'tariffs' was first dropped, and I'm glad I did.
Sure, you still had to buy the license, dev kits, and so on. But at the time, Nintendo was taking something like a third of the cost per unit, right off the top, if I remember correctly.
I'm going to go reread Game Over.
You're absolutley correct that the PSX's ease for developers to write for was a major factor, especially compared to something like the Saturn.
But Sony's real *business* genius was not doing what Nintendo did, which was to artificially limit developer access to the console.
At the time, Nintendo was still whole-hog on the 'Nintendo Seal of Quality' and treated developers like serfs. You had to get Nintendo's approval to publish, you had to go *through* Nintendo for cartridge production, and Nintendo would limit how many games a year you could publish.
They did this because they didn't want a second Great Video Game Crash of 1982.
Because cartridges take a loooong time to manufacture, developers had two choices: go big and hope your game actually sells and you're not left holding a massive inventory of unsold carts, or go little and risk having the game be a hit, and sold out for months while you wait your turn for the next cartridge run.
PSX, on the other hand, ran on CDs, and Sony couldn't care less about what you published. You could get your CDs made at any factor that could press CDs, and you could stamp out an entire run in a weekend at pennies per, compared to tens of dollars per cart in manufacturing and license fees.
Nintendo was acting like it was an inevitable force of nature, rather than a big fish in a sea of competition.
The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader.