To be fair, it's a pretty broad stretch to compare buying an xbox to "terrifying and violent failure modes of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship".

The console experience is easy to understand for non-technical folk, is vertically integrated (you buy a headset with the correct label and you can voice chat with your friends, you know you have the prerequisite account to play X game on your platform), is fully usable with a controller and designed from the ground up for a tv.

The gaming PC experience is... far worse. If you buy a $1000 gaming PC, you're going to need to install steam/epic/gog/xbox/origin/ea to play the top 5 games of the year, deal with awful audio issues, masses of account systems with varying levels of "party" support, hardware/driver incompatibilities, background software issues (antivirus, etc), varied levels of online play/party support, mixed support for controller/kbm, the list goes on. Networking issues? Hope you don't accidentally have a double NAT, or you might run into [0]. That's before touching on the actual open way of running proton on linux (You have an Nvidia card? tough. Have an AMD card? that's great, just compile your own mesa).

It's tempting to distill this down to "convenience", but it's much more than that. For many people (including myself, a professional programmer) that convenience is the difference between gaming being a way I want to spend my time or not. I'm not choosing between an open and closed device, I'm choosing between a closed device or no device.

[0] https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/connect... (disclaimer: I work for Epic, we have skin in this, but this is my own personal experience, and I don't work on the store)