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Alastar Gabriel (but you can call me anything). I'm an ex-professional software developer, now I make weird art and music :p I will give you bug facts unprompted
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in reply to @QuestForTori's post:
There was also a fun thing from one dev who discovered that indeed most of their bugs were reported on Linux… but that those bugs weren’t Linux-specific. Instead, they just found that Linux users were more likely to submit bug reports.
I remember reading something to the same effect about the quake 3 arena beta being released on mac first
Fewer devs mean fewer tools and less testing/support for the tools that do exist, which means fewer games which means smaller audiences on those platforms looking to buy them, plus it means fewer developers making games on those platforms since it’s what they use as their daily driver machine, and the cycle repeats >~>
So I don't mean this to come off as pointed, I feel like it can potentially but that's not the intent.
Are there still big reasons to try and develop native linux ports with how Proton is nowadays? Or at the very least, targeting proton compatibility rather than native linux use?
Proton is not a perfect copy of Windows and needs to be tested separately for compatibility. Not every dev does this. A handful actually do support Proton as the intended way to play on Linux but most completely ignore Wine/Proton issues.
Valve's own compatibility information gets out of date sometimes. Either a game marked working really doesn't or a game never officially tested has always worked perfectly.
DRM.
There’s also the fact that if a dev wanted to reach multiple platforms, they’d probably do both Mac and Linux. But now that Proton has taken hold as most people’s default way to play games on Linux, most devs don’t bother with ports at all, which means Mac gets stuck with absolutely NO way to play the game.
The days of buds are long gone now 
I'm also curious what's involved in making mac ports on arm now, I'm assuming it's more than "change some flags" but that's also well out of my realm of knowledge.
Apple actually released a tool very recently called the Game Porting Toolkit which helps devs answer this exact question! It shows what your game would look like when running on MacOS with no tweaks so you can see what still would need to be changed. :)
Oh nice!
I'm kinda surprised apple is doing stuff like that outside of some apple arcade specific/restricted use, given how they're pushing that lately. Because of all the things you've mentioned I just assume, from the outside, that it's extremely rare to see a game with macos compatibility if it's not coming from apple's marketplaces.
Pretty much. Apple tried a handful of times to partner with Valve for things like VR or extended support, only for Valve to drop the ball the minute the money dried up (and put in the bare minimum when they did support things).
Now they're partnering with the likes of Kojima, CAPCOM, SEGA, etc. to directly bring games to Mac themselves, and Game Porting Toolkit is essentially Apple's answer to Proton, except you can't ship software with/for it (so it's only for testing). Though they do also provide tools to convert DirectX shaders to Metal shaders, which is in part what GPT is meant to test (since it runs this atop WINE).
"GPT" at the end here threw me for a loop for a good moment or two before I realized what it was.
They should have tools for creating multiplatform releases and call it something like the "universal environment for interpreters (UEFI)" or something
I'm curious what the workload is for "hey let's make sure it runs in proton" vs "let's do a native linux port". I imagine a lot of that depends on how the game was built.
As a user and from a wider picture view, a native linux port is for sure better. I think for anyone big enough to be looking at a game in terms of a business, it starts to become a harder sell. In that scenario I think proton is also a lot more attractive since I feel like that's basically the intended steam deck platform at this point rather than native. Might be wrong on that but those are the vibes I get. Almost just the steam deck as a platform rather than linux (despite the fact that it IS linux)
as a linux user, i don't ever want to touch windows. i don't think i'll even support properly windows for any programs i develop.
if windows users want to run my programs they can compile it themselves (or see if the untested binaries work), they can run it in wsl, or they can run linux in a liveboot.