The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (…) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware.
You cannot directly compare PC specs with those of a console. TLoU was made by Naughty Dog who are well known for squeezing absurd amounts or performance out of console hardware. The way to do this by leveraging a platforms specific strong points. The engine is very likely designed around the strengths of the console’s hardware.
PCs have a different architecture from consoles, with different trade-offs. For example: PCs are designed to be modular. You can replace graphics cards, processors, RAM, etc. This comes at a cost. One such cost is that a PC GPU has to have it’s own discrete RAM. There is a performance penalty to this. On a console things can be much more tightly integrated. I/O on a PS5 is a good example. It’s not just a fast SSD, it’s also a storage controller with more priority levels, it’s also a storage controller that interfaces directly with the GPU cache, etc.