As a former games programmer who had the misfortune of working with that system, the problem with the S is that it had vastly lower performances than the X, but if you wanted to release on it you still had to find a way to make it run on that piece of crap, which was absolute hell for demanding games and kind of entirely defeated the purpose of releasing on console (where you can expect everyone to have the same hardware). As a sidenote, I’d love to talk to whoever was in charge of pulling that off for RDR2 because they clearly are a master of the dark arts.

That being said I totally agree with you on the lower costing hardware and optimization thing.