Take the switch, if you wanted to sell it as an "open" platform my guess is Nintendo would have to price it $75-100 higher. That's a huge shift in what consumers are willing to buy and my guess is it would be a lot less successful as a platform.
But I know for a fact that since launch the Xbone and PS4 were profitable. They were never sold as a loss leader.
Especially now, after all 3 have been out for years, none are losing money. They are all profitable when sold and then infinite money machines by acting as a tax on developers and consumers.
If wide open hardware and appstore was a recipe for success Android would be a clear winner. However if you want to ship a title where you get the most out of the platform and you can rely on the platform to be stable from both HW and SW perspective then curating that space seems to be a recipe for success.
It's be really neat if all the console hardware was wide open, however there's a bunch of hurdles there that tend to lead towards curated platforms being more successful.
They are a gross facimilie of computer. They waste what could be general usage hardware on restricted functionality all for the sake of maintaing total software control to extort maximum profits out of their userbase. And they can only get away with it by having their userbases - the audience they hold captive is pressure on game developers to have to submit to their rule to access their captive audience.
They are a middle men that parasitizes developers and gamers for the utility of "convenience" but its their market dominance that prevents less heinous alternatives from emerging. SteamOS was the closest we saw and even that Valve wasn't willing to invest that much into given its less profitable than the fully proprietary contemporaries.