They sure don't care about games on Mac, but I think this specific issue is more due to trying to do "magic" for better or worse.
Introducing the notch creates this "here but not really usable" area that is specific to some displays, and Apple touts it as something that will just work thanks to their software layer.
Yet every app has to deal with it one way or another and most apps that care about screen estate or resolution will need hacks.
It will be the same for every feature that pushes the boundaries and offers an abstraction layer as an answer to how the issues will be solved.
No, every app does not need to deal with it, at least in principle. Apple could literally have provided a resolution list which only covers the 16:10 resolutions which aren't covered by the notch, and then games literally wouldn't have known that they were running on a machine with a notch.
The problem here is 100% that Apple, for some reason, provides both 16:10 "safe" resolutions and the actual whole screen resolutions. All those non-16:10 resolutions are a trap, because they cause the compositor to downscale the window to fit below the notch anyway -- they serve literally no point. There is no situation where a user would want a window that's 16:10.39 or whatever and then downscaled to fit within the bounds of the 16:10 safe area, so there is no reason to provide those 16:10.39 resolutions in the list of display modes.
Apple botched the implementation, but the hardware would've been perfectly reasonable and caused no issues or complexities for either users or developers if Apple hadn't botched the software.
There are ways for an application to actually use 100% of the screen and draw over the notch[0], and apps taking screen captures or need to know the screen area but not for drawing will also need the full actual screen resolution.
Yeah, and there should be a special "get the actual full resolution of the screen" for those apps which use the special "draw to the actual full resolution of the screen" APIs. But the normal case should be for the OS to upheld the illusion that the screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio which excludes the part with the notch.
Or a (user-configurable) setting per app, and if the user configures the app to run below the notch, the OS should return the 16:10 resolutions and make the app draw below the notch; and if the user configures the app to take up the whole screen, the OS should return the full resolutions and make the app draw to the whole screen.
There should be no case where the app gets told about the 16:10.34 resolutions through normal display mode query APIs, but then gets scaled by the OS to fit in the 16:10 area below the notch.
Introducing the notch creates this "here but not really usable" area that is specific to some displays, and Apple touts it as something that will just work thanks to their software layer.
Yet every app has to deal with it one way or another and most apps that care about screen estate or resolution will need hacks.
It will be the same for every feature that pushes the boundaries and offers an abstraction layer as an answer to how the issues will be solved.