People who say "it was never the case" are misremembering history.

Yes, consoles are sold at a loss initially. However, the price-to-performance ratio (in terms of frames per second) consistently decreases over time, regardless of what console manufacturers do.

For example, the original PlayStation was released in 1994 at a cost of $600. By the end of 1999, just six years later, you could emulate its games on a fairly inexpensive, older PC. In 1994, while the first Doom ran on a relatively costly i386/i486, it was impossible to match the arcade-quality graphics of PlayStation games like Tekken 1 to 3. However, by the time the PlayStation 2 was released, it became feasible to use an affordable older PC with a low to mid-range GPU to exceed the graphical capabilities of any console available at that time.

The only period when consoles were truly cheap—meaning they were sold at a loss—was during the first few months after their release. If you already owned a PC, you could easily surpass the performance of newly released consoles by simply upgrading your GPU.