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Now imagine Apple put the same amount of effort and resources into a Proton-like layer for macOS.

The M-series hardware is perfectly fine for most games, overpowered even. What is lacking are the actual games. Very few companies bother with Metal ports of games.

Build a compatibility layer so we can just install any Windows game from Steam and start playing.

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Apple did! The Game Porting Toolkit does (I think) what you're talking about and what Steam did for Linux.

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

Why it hasn't taken off, I have no idea.

Without even opening the link "porting toolkit" seems like something I need to put effort into.

Proton + Steam is pretty much just clicking "Allow Linux" on a dashboard somewhere and then it'll just work.

Hence why studios have no reason to bother with GNU/Linux even if they happen to target Android/Linux, let Valve do the work.

There was some anecdotal stuff floating around some years ago that smaller studios stopped doing custom Linux builds because Proton+Windows ran faster than their native build =)

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