Few devs work with Metal directly - iOS or otherwise. I think the play here is to get Metal adopted by popular middleware so that devs who use them get native Mac support "for free".

And it appears that gaming in general is coalescing around Unreal and Unity, and both have strong native Mac support.

Metal support I think is less of a problem than Apple's own hardware - the anemic GPUs in consumer Macs prevent most AAA titles from being playable, even if the middleware is completely abstracted out. Apple's focus on hi-dpi displays makes this even worse.

Apple doesn't seem to have a coherent strategy around this. If you look at the Mac App Store right now, the games being most heavily advertised all have very marginal performance even on higher-end Macs, and likely straight up won't run on most of their (new!) laptops. It seems absurd that Apple is so heavily marketing games that will barely run on a typical Mac.

That may be true but tech-wise no casual game I'm aware of needs Metal so the logic doesn't follow. (Specifically casual games that I've played are not pushing performance so a more performant low level API doesn't help.)

You're absolutely right. Apple is trying to make it work on Macs, which is the real issue.