What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports.

Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense.

Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).