The competition at the time was also cutting edge at the time, the result of billions of dollars of investment over decades, and Linux was nothing. There's no reason that your argument couldn't have been made in 1991. Why, specifically, would it have been a bad argument in 1991, since we now know it would have been?
I don't deny that, but just the feature gap was a lot less compared to what it is now.
We're talking about a time where video games were made by teams of 5 people, not 500.
If the cutting edge technology is using a rock on a stick and you're using a rock, it's easier to catch up than if you're using a rock and they already have tree cutters working on nuclear energy.
Related: are you trying to make an argument that a small team or a single person shouldn't try to write a video game in 2022?
The comparison doesn't make sense.
Linux was not released in 2022, competing against 2022's Windows, it was released in 1991, competing with the technology at the time, and has since evolved and grew progressively, as the competition evolved and grew.
Releasing a new browser in 2022, competing against 2022's Chrome and Firefox, is a way bigger task (not that it's their goal).