I don't think it matters one way or another.
The downside is that idiots will only do stupid things with information they don't understand. It can cut both ways - obfuscating a bad look or downplaying a good one that just doesn't look bombastic enough to be good. Either publishers or fanboys can do this btw.
I think CCU watching has been a net negative. I think that it's often used by the gaming internet to muddy the waters of a game's success or to fan the flames of some brigade; and, more importantly, used by marketing firms to boost the "viral" profile of games that really add nothing to the medium, beyond a metric for investors and developers to try to copy-paste. you have to ask the question about bots for F2P mp titles. Bearing in mind that the sales estimates on Steam for games with mid-very high launch concurrent player counts are significantly overinflated. See Expedition 33 and Elden Ring for reference.
It's just reinforced and bolstered the MAU obsession the industry has going right now, which is sending it in a worse direction.
And that's me talking as a consumer. Stepping into the perspective of a publisher or dev, I would hate for my game to be inorganically spurned because there's a screenshot of the Steam CCUs going around.
This kind of thing will happen on Steam and PC in general. It's just the nature of the platform and it's fair enough. If consoles continue to cede their propriety in big or small ways in attempts to match openness with PC, they'll just become PCs. That's why Microsoft's next "Xbox" is going to be a PC with an Xbox logo slapped on the case. Which is a bad thing for everyone, btw.
Well my thing is, if you're a dev or publisher, if your game isn't catching on then the truth is going to eventually come out one way or another. If you're afraid of having a Steam CCU screenshot paint your title in a bad light, wouldn't a PlayStation CCU potentially be beneficial, especially if most of the player base is on PlayStation and not Steam? Right then and there, you could shut a fake narrative down, or at least show that one place's numbers don't tell the whole story.
I also think having those fears ultimately might just prevent devs from getting more engaged with their game's community, which could isolate them from constructive criticism & feedback, as they inoculate themselves into a self-fellating, toxic positivity echo chamber. I'd also say most of the devs and/or pubs who are weary of CCUs, are that way because they likely engage in marketing or messaging tactics that needlessly attack many potential customers simply because of a few asshat bigots whose voices get amplified way too much partly by the games media, and those devs & pubs laser-focusing on them instead of positive feedback from actual fans (or respectable, constructive criticism from actual fans).
Also, I don't think consoles providing more transparency in game player metrics is the same as console platforms ceding themselves to being more like PCs. If that was an actual point, we should've been concerned last gen when PS & Xbox (and eventually Nintendo) adopted PC-like x86-64 CPU technologies and GPUs from PC-centric graphics providers. And not all forms of openness are bad; just because SIE were to, say, enable transparency in CCUs or other MAU metrics of games on PlayStation, doesn't mean they're going to allow other storefronts or OSes to openly run on PlayStation consoles (and potentially disrupt or destroy the tight synergy they already have, or introduce performance & security issues/vulnerabilities at a mass scale). I think that's a bit of a reach.
Technically speaking, free online was something consoles (well, at least PlayStation and Nintendo) already offered even in the '00s, same as PC...were PS2, Gamecube, Wii, DS or PS3 suddenly anywhere near close to being PCs because of that? No, I don't think so.
