This is one of the most obnoxiously ignorant articles I have ever read.
For more than three decades, gamers and console manufacturers have entered into an honest pact: I buy your system for a few hundred bucks, and you, along with third-party developers, supply me with the best games you can make on that platform for five to seven years.
And by the time "Scorpio" and "Neo" are released, it'll be around five years since the Xbox One and Playstation 4 were first released. The Xbox 360 and PS3 generation lasted around 8 years, and the current console generation has been said by many companies to be capable of lasting a decade, thus giving Scorpio/Neo five years' life. Sounds like what you're saying there.
Maintaining a PC that can play the latest and greatest games gets wildly expensive
No more expensive than buying a new console every few years.
and gamers that refuse to upgrade risk being shut out from new releases after only a few years.
So do console gamers who don't buy the next generation of consoles.
Even if a newer title is compatible with older tech, it often suffers from a lower frame rate or generally poorer graphical performance.
Just Cause 3 came out in 2015. The Xbox One and Playstation 4 came out in 2013 and neither can maintain even 30FPS in that game, with constant drops to around 15FPS. Until quite recently, I was using a GTX 760 - a GPU that also came out in 2013 - and, whilst a constant 60FPS was virtually impossible (mostly due to the game being horribly optimised), Just Cause 3 never (or at least, extremely rarely) dropped below 30FPS for me. To coin a phrase, your argument is invalid.
developers decided to treat consoles just like PCs, leveraging gaming systems’ always-on internet connections to issue patches to already released games. In effect, this means any modern video game can become a TLOP-esque odyssey of endless updates and bug fixes. Some developers abuse this power.
Whilst this is a major problem that shouldn't exist, it's not a "PC problem" at all - it's publishers rushing developers. If release dates were simply "when it's ready", this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, publishers take the approach of making money first and fixing the game later.
But games were actually cheaper, more stable, and more varied before the console-makers became desperate to imitate desktop computers.
No, they weren't. Major bugs and other such issues were simply not known to be as common as they are because you didn't have thousands of people posting videos online about it until a few years ago.
the games that truly push the envelope on the high-spec consoles may struggle on the base platforms. Metal Gear Solid 5, one of the last AAA games to debut on current and last-gen systems, struggled to maintain a consistent framerate on PS3 and 360, even as it wowed visually on PS4 and Xbox One.
Just as it would struggle on a low-end PC as opposed to a high-end one. That's what this Scorpio thing is - it's a high-end Xbox One. Nobody's telling you that you have to buy it, just like I don't have to run out and grab two GTX 1080s and an SLI bridge. Sure, it'd be nice if I could afford that, but I'm not really missing out on much by sticking to what I've currently got. I can play modern games just fine and currently have no interest in VR.
Come back when you’ve got a proper new console ready in 2020, and let me enjoy my perfectly fine, current-gen games in peace.
You do that. As I said before, nobody's forcing you to upgrade.
This is what happens when I'm bored.