I'm not so sure about that. Sony encouraged devs to aim for 1440p or higher with checkerboarding on PS4 Pro, and most devs did so. Some games are less than 1440p onPS4 Pro, but alot achieved Sony's target. Xbox One X by comparison, MS was simply encouraging devs to aim as high as possible I think, and most games are 1800p or 4K on XB1 X, only a few are lower than 1800p. I think that most devs will aim for 4K on Series X, even if some choose to go with 30 fps to push graphics further. PS5 is another matter, we still don't know it's specs, if it is 9-10 tflop like some rumors suggest, 3rd party devs will likely aim for 1800p or a bit above on PS5 compared to 2160p on Series X because it is easier to scale back resolution than graphical effects.

You also have to remember that 8K tv's are already a thing and will be becoming more and more common throughout the gen, which will likely end around 2027 or 2028. It's going to look bad marketing wise if 8K tv's are a thing and their consoles aren't even hitting native 4K on most games. I think that Sony and MS will strongly encourage devs to aim for native 4K on PS5 and Series X, so that their mid-gen refresh consoles can aim for higher than 4K so that they can market them as 8K consoles, even if in reality they'll probably be much lower resolution scaled up to 8K. 

I can't for my life undertand the point of acting as if a super niche hardware revision is an actual console with dozens of millions sold.

I can't for my life undertand the point of acting as if a super niche hardware revision is an actual console with dozens of millions sold.

Yes, and if Microsoft goes through with releasing Lockhart with a 4 tflop RDNA 2 GPU, the new baseline will be Xbox Series S/Lockhart once last gen support is dropped, a console with at least 4x the graphical and CPU power of the old baseline, base Xbox One (plus a huge storage speed improvement). It makes sense for devs to use that extra 4x power to improve graphics at 1080p compared to this gen, then scale up to 4K on PS5 and Xbox Series X. Some developers may choose to develop first for PS5 and XSX and then scale down for XSS, but most are probably going to do the opposite, because scaling up is easier than scaling down. In other words, most next-gen 3rd party games will probably be 4K on Xbox Series X and PS5. 

The focus will eventually shift to 8K, likely by the end of the gen. 8K tv prices are already down to where 4K prices were just a few years ago. MS and Sony won't be able to resist marketing their mid-gen refresh consoles as 8K (hell, MS and Sony are already marketing Series X and PS5 as 8K consoles even though the concept of any games actually being native 8K, or anything higher than native 4K on them is utterly ridiculous).

With Microsoft and most third parties likely committed to cross gen for at least 24months, I think Microsoft will have a hard time distinguishing Xbox Series S from X1X. When support for current gen is dropped it'll be much easier but since MS have already said that won't happen for 2 years after Series X launches, so it feels like they should just let those on a budget continue to game on Xbox One or upgrade to Xbox One X which is already $299.

You get crap like "Ain't nothin gonna beat X series X, there ain't no PC with enough flops to beat it!", and that's just one example of the crap some people spread over there. Colteastwood is doing a bang up job on spreading misinformation and making Tflops his main boasting point for Xbox, to a point where he's downplaying PS5's supposed specs, and then his fanboys downplaying PC at the same time.

I wish that Xbox's marketing team wasn't so high up on spreading bullshit information or trying to warp it to make it sound like it'd be something the casual or laymen folk would know about (but they don't, so now we're seeing this shit spread like wild-fire, just like "blast processing" from the old days). I honestly wish it'd stop, because it just makes some folk look really, really stupid.

You're missing the point, Microsoft NEEDS to compete with playstation, they wouldn't launch a much weaker console, unless they want to come in 3rd place yet again for the 3rd time. In fact that would be free advertising for sony, it would be all over gaming news and word of mouth that ps5 is way more powerful, everyone would just pay a bit more and get the ps5.

Maybe thats what microsoft wants, I get a feeling they've been wanting to quit gaming consoles for a long time now, they aren't even trying anymore.

If ps5 base console is 450dollars, it would be at least 9 teraflops, xbox would be a laughing joke if it is less than half the graphical power, people would just joke that it isn't even next gen while ps5 is the true next gen. Not to mention there wont even be exclusives on xbox for 2 years. No one would buy it. And a console without a disc drive? See how well the xbox one S all digital did? It didn't sell much at all. Most people would rather pay a bit more and get the option of disc drive.

Im not complaining about 4tf against the xbox X, Im looking how it compared to the competition next generation.

At 300dollars they would never in a million years put a 1terabyte ssd, that would cost half the price of the console parts (without the controller), unless they put HDD instead, the xbox X uses HDD not ssd.

Both Geforce GTX 1650 Super (4.9 TFlops) and Radeon RX 5500 XT (5.2 TFlops) are on par with a Radeon RX 590 (7.1 TFlops).

The graphic performance of a 4 TFlops Lockhart would probably be on par with the 6.2 TFlops of the Xbox One X and wouldn't have the CPU-bottleneck.

So average performance of the Xbox One X with better frametimes / less slowdowns.
Similar performance in high resolutions, but better performance in FullHD.

The point is that a XSS (Xbox Series S) is probably cheaper to produce than a X1X (Xbox One X) while being at least as fast as the X1X and avoiding some bottlenecks (CPU, RAM, loading times).