But the absolute biggest game changer was that it was silent. Completely silent. Hadn’t realised how noisy computers had been until then.
The only hard failure I've hit (admittedly with a small sample size) was The Talos Principle, which has an intel Mac version that won't run on the M2, and running through Whisky immediately errored as well.
Both Unity and Unreal support metal well (and for a long time, better than Vulkan), especially due to iOS. Even many proprietary engines do.
Even before Vulkan and Metal existed, OpenGL was consistent (before Apple stopped supporting it) and there weren’t many more native games then either.
Someone will no doubt bring up reusing Proton, but they’ll gloss over the differences in platform and also that Game Porting Toolkit exists and does the same thing.
The reality is that, until recently, the number of Mac systems that were gaming ready was a very small number that wasn’t worth focusing on.
I wouldn't call my ThinkPad P14s AMD gen whatever loud either. The fan will spin up when multiple cores are under heavy load but compared to the 2018 MBP it replaced it's essentially silent.
I also had a Ryzen 3700X, high-end CPU and case fans to make it somewhat quiet under load. Then I got the MacBook Air M1, which was as fast in multi-core use, but felt much faster in daily use to much better single thread performance (turns out that large builds spend quite some time on portions where everything blocks on one unit and the amount of parallelism is 1). And it was completely quiet (no fan).
The Air M1 felt like magic at the time, I could have the power of the 3700X on the train and insanely long battery life.
[1] That said, I got an M3 Pro for work and my private laptop has an M1 Pro and the difference in single-thread performance is certainly noticeable.