It's not a dumb question. I actually used to use an iMac 27" with an Nvidia 680 that I would boot into Bootcamp / Windows for my primary gaming computer. I covered it in "built, not bought" stickers at Quakecon one year.

You can't do x86/x64 Windows on M-series Macs without emulation and it is generally a poor experience. There's a few things like Crossover, Parallels, etc that can help you run Windows games.

But I have found that most of the games I care about are either Mac native or on GeForce Now at this point. There's a surprisingly large game catalog on Mac now.

So the short answer is that some of them run on some sort of Windows compatibility layer, some are Mac native, some I stream. But most of my favorites run native on Mac.

To be honest, there are so many games to play these days that I don't mind missing out on a few titles. Valorant is a good example of a game that I can't play on Mac, GFN, or Crossover. But it's OK, I still have CS2.

Whisky also does a great job at running Windows games with minimal setup / overhead.

I'm wondering if it might actually be easier to install Asahi Linux (or some other distro) on Apple Silicon for gaming via Proton, until Game Porting Toolkit is adopted more.

Yes — World of Warcraft, League of Legends and DotA 2 all have native macOS ports. WoW got an Apple Silicon port relatively recently IIRC (last expansion).

WoW was probably the first game that was ported to the ARM architecture (2020), so it's not that recent.

All those games listed have native Apple Silicon Mac ports now.

Only WoW, LoL and Dota are being translated through the Rosetta.

WoW itself is actually native Apple Silicon, but I believe the launcher uses Rosetta.

In my experience with gaming on Macs, even when there is a native Mac port of a particular game, the experience is inferior to Windows more often than not. Many of them don't do 4K properly, for example (you get everything rendered at half-res in fullscreen). Things like Cmd+Tab don't work reliably, either.