Yes they do, which I said above.
Yes they are more optimized, that's how they are able to keep up as well as they do. A 3070 completely blows away the current console gen specs wise. Due to optimizations, it is a lot closer than it looks on paper but 3070 is still ahead by a sizeable margin.
I'm not here to shit on consoles. I said they are the base experience. The "good enough" experience. If OP's card is outdoing that by a significant amount still, he doesn't need to upgrade. If he's getting the same performance of consoles, that's still good enough. If he's starting to dip below consoles, maybe consider buying a new GPU or CPU, or maybe just get to more of your backlog for a while. Realistically he's got around 4 more years, maybe more the way pricing for electronics will affect how fast requirements go up.

I agree with you that there have been a lot of reactionary takes to this news. But I do think that many if not all Linux distributions can choose to ignore it, yes. I think it's inherently unenforceable. How is California supposed to have say over a random guy in the Netherlands who makes a distro? Even a distros based in California should be able to put a disclaimer that this OS is not to be used in the state of California. Maybe make a California version with age verification at worst. And then everyone will proceed to use the non age verification version because what is the government going to do? Kick in every door and manually check if your computer OS is in compliance? Even if they went to that extent (they won't), what is the criteria for criminally charging someone? What if you are just visiting California, do you have to reinstall your OS for a few days?