That was something they could actually market to the consumer as a necessary upgrade, though.

• “Sure, you need a new cable, but component video has cleaner edges and less color bleeding.”
• “Sure, you need a new cable, but HDMI has better resolution and no fuzziness.”

Going from HDMI 2.1 to DisplayPort 2.1a doesn’t offer anything other than higher bandwidth, and not even high-end PCs are capable of pushing resolutions at high enough framerates for that bandwidth to have been the limiting factor for games.

Even though DisplayPort is objectively better than HDMI, the optics of replacing HDMI on consumer devices that are meant to be connected to TVs isn’t good. It will come across to consumers as an unnecessary, arbitrary change meant to push their TVs towards planned obsolescence.

They’re going to complain about it, the media will pick up on the story and try to turn it into a scandal, and then legislators and regulators will step in and make decisions based on limited understanding of the technical reasons. By that point, one of the console manufacturers will have been pressured into backing down and promise to keep HDMI in their next-gen console, and the other ones will have followed suit because they don’t want to lose sales over it.