It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
Compare Steam Machine (2014) to Steam Machine (2026). The difference this time around is Proton support, and you can pretty easily see the hype on the internet for the new version, even after the original version was mocked relentlessly in some circles for having "no games."
Also, how could Apple kill the old software that is better than the new, if it doesn't control the emulation? This way they don't have to even have 10% of the features to force you to buy again.
cough /final cut/ cough
For funsies, try searching App Store apps and find a way to filter out results for apps with IAP. Nope!
(Source: me, who spent time at a mobile gaming company as we figured out how to continuously optimize our funnels so that some rich dudes in Qatar could continue to spend $40K a month on useless cosmetics.)
The efforts are usually short-lived and mostly fruitless, but I wouldn't say they're "grossed out" by gaming nerds.
They released Apple Vision Pro with no ability to play popular PC games on it.
A VR headset. That doesn't play games.
"evaluate your unmodified Windows executable on Apple silicon using the evaluation environment for Windows games"
A bunch of games just ship the Windows executable and some version of that translation layer in their MacOS App bundle
They'll spend billions on a handful of (late) AAA ports for macOS every 4-5 years, and then go radio silent again.
I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.
The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.
You don't need Proton's Wine fork when you can just use Wine.
There's also DXMT which is open-source, but doesn't support DX12.
Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
In comparison the proton experience is seamless.
Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation.
Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.
The available low-level API is Metal, and the existing software stack is written for Vulkan, so it makes more sense to implement Vulkan than to write a new Metal backend.
You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API.
On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.