Because people in power need excuses to hit people they don't like without having to pay weregild for it. That's it, that's the entire purpose of laws. The whole "protecting society" theory is a convenient smokescreen that we've all bought into through generations upon generations of Stockholm syndrome and the fact that we all also want to hit people and be justified in doing so from time to time.

I have a lower-mid tier (Ryzen7 2700 or 2700x, I don't exactly remember right now, Nvidia GTX 1650, 16gigs of RAM,) and I can game just fine at 1080p. Granted I'm not exactly worried about 4K or 666 FPS or whatever the hardcore gamers are into these days, but most games work well with proton and steam. Some even run better through proton than they do in Windows natively.