> Linux thrives as a platform for games by running Windows binaries very well, and macOS would do well to do the same.

No. Linux gaming thrives because Valve embedded Wine directly, branded as Proton, into the Steam launcher. GPT is the same, only for the Mac target of wine rather than Linux, and obviously Apple can't integrate it into Steam.

In terms of compatibility I've been using Whisky (a wine UI wrapper) + GPT for a few weeks now and window steam loads fine (albeit slowly), and all the windows games I play work fine (certainly far better than wine - GPT).

Of course the problem here is that it's not cleanly integrated into native Steam, so it's (1) requires a separate launcher installed, (2) requires a separate steam install, and (3) if the game ever does get ported you'd need to migrate your saves from the windows container wine uses.

This ignores all the attendant performance thrown away by shader translation (that linux also suffers) and cpu translation (that any non-intel code suffers, but in practice that's just Mac)

Let me restate: Apple does not consider GPT a consumer-facing product. It's meant to entice game developers do "see the power of metal". Proton being well embedded and all sure helps, but it's not the basic prerequisite, which Apple is withholding from being integrated by anyone but themselves, and it doesn't look like they have much interest in it beyond being a cool demo.

The point of GPT is that game developers don't have to target Metal, they can stick with DirectX or Vulkan and let Apple's translation layer do the rest.

Apple has been pretty clear that GPT is there so you can get an idea of how well your game would run on macOS, not to actually ship games with it. The license doesn't allow for that.