Having just read the headline... but to me it's not a pointless metric because it exemplifies that there's more to software development that purely writing code.
From what I've seen, you have to use third party porting services. Godot being open source and not a legal entity prevents them from adding porting support in their engine because the console SDKs are secret and protected by NDAs.
This has inspired me boot up GameMaker Studio 2 again. I usually come back to it now and then just to mess around, not really with the goal of making anything complete.
It's been a while since I touched it last, but I made this back in 2018. Never worked on it past what's in the video but it was still fun to work on!
Doubtful it even made that much considering the author said most of the steam players were friends or family. That said, I don't think you should go into indie development trying to go viral and make a ton of money.
I love this blog post because it highlights how difficult, yet fun and challenging it can be to create a game from scratch. I've messed around with GameMaker Studio 2 several times and this post has inspired me to do so again. Compared to the competition it's a relatively simple game engine, but it can be fun just to mess around and see what you're able to create.
I could see allowing only localstorage saving with no option for exporting or importing of data being limiting enough for me personally to have enough reason to upgrade to pro, maybe limit the number of plans you can have (if you haven't already, I haven't tested it) as well as the number of times you can actually save to localstorage.
I liked this enough where I made a model during my lunch break, then remade it when I got home, and then remade it a third time after I had accidentally pressed the "back" button on my mouse talking to someone on Discord, taking me back to the landing page and losing all my data.
After that last one I decided to at least get the free trial so I could save, but I had already planned pay for Premium so I wasn't too bothered.
Make sure your HDMI cable doesn't support ethernet... I've seen people comment about their TVs updating through HDMI when connected to peripherals like consoles.
You also forget to mention they changed the font of certain UI elements to the same as the wordmark, namely the server name. The legibility of the new font is objectively worse than the previous one, though as long as it remains exclusive to the server name I agree, it's not that big of a deal.
I can't speak for other countries, but both parents cannot take parental leave at the same time in Norway. Some choose to use vacation days while the other parent has parental leave, but it's a fair assumption to make that one of the parents were working while the other was on parental leave.