Once again, stop conflating what it is you or your indie dev team do, with what the AAA game development industry does, when it comes to game development pipelines. Your methodology != the entire industry's.
I did work at Ubisoft and have friends or former coworkers working (or who have worked in recent years) in many AAA publishers even including heads of studios, and in case of big ass Sony internally developed games ported to PC, a least one that I can remember in a lead position (one of their producers).
I also work in gamedev related universities and accelerators with people from AAA studios who are the other teachers or mentors. And also host gamedev related conferences and round tables plus museum exhibitions where I invite some of this people. I'm also in gamedev chat groups and associations, plus attend to industry events and congresses where I talk to more people, including top tier people from the industry on worldwide level.
And next year will be my 20th year in the industry as dev. So I know very well how most people works, even hosted round tables about it with people in lead positions at top AAA and mobile publishers.
And no, I never said the entire industrry works like I do with my team (teams in this case). This is another stuff you are mading up.
Naughty Dog have outright stated they retooled their pipeline to facilitate PC development more efficiently and from an earlier part of the development process. And if ND have done that, you can believe other studios have as well, such as Guerrilla Games.
No, ND didn't change a shit because isn't needed, pretty simply Iron Galaxy kept the PC specific codebase that Iron Galaxy did for the PC ports in the game engine, to make easier Iron's Galaxy job in the next game.
Maybe Nixxes or Jetpack shared with Iron Galaxy some PC small specific stuff they did for their ports to save additional job.
ND only needs a producer to have an hour long weekly meeting (maybe every two weeks) to overview Iron Galaxy's progress when making a port. Maybe a UI designer in a meeting or two to overview and approve their proposals for the related little changes required for a PC port.
Plus in case they have specific questions, someone (prety likely some high profile designer, programmer or artist who worked in the original game) to reply them some mail or maybe provide them some extra documentation they may need.
Nixxes & others are still involved in the port and handle QOL implementations & Windows OS, DX12U, CUDA etc. specific optimizations of game code & functions, but you're dumb to think they are literally taking full/completed PS5 code, starting from square one, and translating all the libraries and code to PC or re-designing all model assets, textures, sound effects etc. for PC. They aren't.
Ad considering there are various LODs and textures for PC that PS5 wouldn't require, guess what that means for the main development studio? Absorption of some costs of an eventual PC port into the main budget of the game, not directly listed in the porting costs budgets allocated to port studios like Nixxes.
This isn't hard to understand; you're just being oblivious to critical thinking to hawk graphs with incomplete data (& sometimes outdated data).
Nixxes, Iron Galaxy or Jetpacks are the porters. Their job is to do the ports, which in case you don't know it's the whole process of adapting a game to a different platform, including any changes and additions made in that new version. The lead sends them the code and assets of the original games and the porters deliver a build in a new platform.
Lead studios hire porters because don't want to handle with that work and prefer to outsource them to some other team (which normally is also cheaper) and focus instead on making new games.
We saw Sony pay them around a couple millions to do so, which is way more than enough to do so such ports, not only a few minor tweaks and additions that require a few lines of code. If that would be the case they'd save the costs of hiring another team and would do it themselves.
Not repeating what I just said above because it more or less applies here, not to mention your and Sony's claims not exactly manifesting the way the vast majority of gamers would expect them to (in part because it doesn't seem like they have been manifesting, or if they have they are mainly for some GAAS that might've been delayed or cancelled, as an example).
Sony claims and does what it's optimal for them which aligns with a ton of other companies do, and what their (and most in other companies) devs prefer: to have some lead teams focused on making new games and to have separate support / porting teams to handle the ports.
