Am I understanding correctly that due to licensing Godot can never support consoles?

If true that makes it so limited as to never be a replacement for Unity.

It's just licencing shenanigans, they can't taint the open source licence by putting proprietary code/assets in the godot repo.

Even with Unity though you can't just publish to consoles without getting the SDK and licencing.

With Godot you basically pay Lone Wolf Technology, a Sony/Nintendo/MS licenced company for their export module and you're done.

Not first-party, but there is third-party console support for Godot: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...

They can it would just have to be a separate private branch. This is how SDL amd others do it.