It has nothing to do with what makes sense and you know it. Staying at 1080p for much longer would be better but the industry is moving to 4k and game devs will push that. It's no different than the many games of the last 15 years that cant hold 30 fps because devs pushed as much eye candy as possible.

True, but they wouldn't be pushing eye candy, they would just be pushing resolution, which isn't really a big selling point for the masses. Like I said before, if resolution was so important, why did the X1X sell only a couple million units? 

Because regardless of resolution, it was a $499 hardware revision of a system that wasnt that popular in the first place.

4k is going to be far more achievable next gen and not come at such a big cost to visual fidelity.
The consoles will have the fillrate to handle it fine for the most part.

The issue between 1440P and 2160P varies from person to person and game to game.
1440P is certainly a step up over 1080P, it's sharper, cleaner and not as resource heavy as 4k, that gives headroom to dial up the visuals, but aliasing/stair stepping/shimmering will be more prevalent than 4k.
Micro-details in texture work aren't likely to pop as much either.

Resolution and framerates will be entirely up to developers, developers chasing the graphics dream will likely opt for 1440P+Ray Tracing @30fps I would imagine.

The reason why allot of PC displays are only 1440P are many... It's a good price/performance level, that way manufacturers can focus on refresh rates and contrasts ratios rather than pure pixel counts... Plus 2160P on a 24" panel is an insane pixel density, keeping that resolution for larger panels makes more sense, plus display processing needs are well equipped to handle 1440P today, which keeps input latency down, you do notice input latency more readily on PC due to the mouse being such a precise form of control.

Also plenty of gamers use 4k. (Steam isn't the entire PC community, it's just a large sampling size.)
Many PC gamers also render games at 4k and downsample them to lower resolutions like 1080P and 1440P.

Personally I can tell the difference between 1440P and 2160P on a 27-31.5" panel, granted it's not going to be as big of a perceivable difference as the move from 1080P to 1440P on the same panel size... For instance, I wanted to stab my eye with a pitch fork once when I had to use a 1080P 27" panel.

At around 21-22-23-24" you might as well stick with 1080P.
25-27" panels, 1440P is a really good fit.
32" and larger 2160P is fantastic.

You can get 32" 1440P panels... And I have one, it has roughly the same pixel density as a 23-24" 1440P panel, so it's doable, but I would hope anyone purchasing such a panel is doing so not because of the resolution but because of the refresh rates instead...

PC displays are also a little different to Televisions, there is less emphasis on post-processing and a larger emphasis on keeping input latencies as low as possible... As the venerable mouse is a highly accurate input method, so manufacturers will often prioritize things differently.

That doesn't make sense. Why could, or should these next gen console aim for native 4k when even a 2080Ti can't even hit 60fps on current gen games at that resolution? I'm not even talking about RT, as that would cut that framerate by another 50%. We would practically be playing the same games we're playing now lol.

An obvious problem with your argument and graphs is you're looking at 4K resolution with highest graphics settings.

Current gen games on consoles don't necessarily run games at highest graphics settings, its often more like a mix of low, medium and high. They lower the graphics settings primarily to maintain a high resolution.

Look at this video of RDR2 for example. The low and medium settings is probably more reflective of the console settings. The ultra settings are well beyond what we get on consoles and gets about half the frame rate of low and medium. Meanwhile high settings looks good and sits comfortably at 60 fps.

Like you I agree aiming for 4K can be a waste of resources, but aiming for ultra settings can also be a waste when high already looks comparable and runs much better. However, another compromise is ultra settings with a dynamic resolution. But if developers do aim for 4K/60 fps, its evident 4K with high settings is fine in this scenario.

Get a job, 500dollars is 1 weeks work.

It wasn't a trick question here. I just asked, from a game development point of view, wouldn't native 4k suck up too much resources and limit the ambitions of developers on next gen console games? Maybe for some people half the overall visual fidelity in favor of 4k or a higher fps isn't a waste of resources, for example if you're gaming on a 144hz monitor. But we've already seen with the X1X that saying "this plays the same games but better" just doesn't fire up consumers like the promise of completely new games that take a dramatic leap from current gen titles does. 

Obviously there are games that do run at 4k/60fps on a $1300 2080Ti, but there are already plenty that don't. So lets take RDR as an example, how is Rockstar supposed to push things even further with RDR3, if the game was designed from the ground up to run in native 4k and RT on ps5? Roughly speaking, the boost in resolution and RT (depending on how AMD's RT cores perform) would leave Rockstar with about the same resources left for making the actual game as they had when they were making RDR2 for the ps4. 

So just let me ask you another question, what kind of leap in overall visual fidelity are you expecting from these next gen games?

That's true but I already said ultra settings are also an enormous waste of resources. You can take almost any current gen game and buckle a 2080ti to it's knees by using ultra or insane settings. That's why developers usually stay clear of settings like that on consoles. They want to be as efficient as possible and won't use settings that take up too much resources with a relatively small gain in visuals. It's why things like FXAA and checkerboard rendering exists.

Congratulations on doing nothing to disprove me. 500 dollars is every expensive for a videogame system.