You might still well be able to do that by the time 2028 rolls around, but it wouldn’t surprise me if you couldn’t build one that runs the sort of AAA games that have been used to set consoles apart from PC, and certainly not with the same ease. You or I might well be able to put together such a PC with minimal fuss, but the very idea of buying and assembling components to build a PC is a non-starter for most of the market. It’s more work than it’s worth to them if they need to do that, rather than just buying something ready made off the shelf. And if they decide they can forgo the big budget console selling titles for this one, they would probably just do better to fire up GOG, Steam, or the market of their choice and run the games on the computer they already have. There’s no reason to plunk down $1200 on a new computer, if you’re only going to be playing stuff like reissues of games from previous generations and indie titles.

The way hardware prices have been increasing, this might still be a price point that has them selling at a loss by the time 2028 rolls around, so there’s that.

Is it really shooting itself in the foot, though? There are plenty of FOSS projects that companies benefit from and never contribute back to, either monetarily, or in the form of writing code. They provide an easy option to make it look more professional while helping to support the project, and you could always fork it and do what you need to with your fork. The idea that developers should do a thankless job to maintain their software in a way that complies with random corporate policies in order to be more widely adopted strikes me as setting up devs to burn out and crash from having all the joy ground out of their projects for them.

UNESCO, the Wikimedia foundation and other major organizations have already implemented it and gotten onboard, so I would suggest your coworkers are being a bit foolish in completely disregarding it because of a single mascot image that has a clear option to replace. The Dev is just saving themselves aggravation from people that were going to make endless demands of them, but most likely balk at actually supporting the project to enable features that only matter to their organization, but not to the Dev themselves or others.