Well everyone was saying PC was dead around that time. But Steam and a bunch of F2P games revitalized the industry that people started getting accustomed to gaming on PCs and started investing in PC. Devs were dropping support for PC or delaying releases Games were not always stable. The PC industry was nothing like it was today in 2008.
Well the PS4 is like a "
erfect gaming PC". Where things are easy for developers and things just work for the player. It's just not upgradeable. Which is really not something you expect for a lot of consumer products.
It's very subjective on what is better, more raw power probably not. But they are not basing their opinion on raw power. They are looking at it as a tech perspective and development perspective and choosing metrics they subjectively think is more important. In the context, I believe he was saying that the architecture was far above top-end PCs. The the article writer just sensationalized and broadened version of what was actually said.
Going back to the other topic you two were talking about. UE5 will be a multiplatform engine that is even coming to the Switch and likely mobile, they will likely make optimizations for being able to rely on having super fast data but it's very unlikely it will be a critical aspect of the engine where the engine won't work without meeting that requirement.