It depends on the game.

What the Xbox calls "haptic feedback" is pretty damn close to just "on" and "off". The Switch blows it out of the water, and the PS5 is way better than the Switch. It feels equivalent to a pretty high quality sound effect transmitted through your hands. Forbidden West, as an example, uses it to provide "audio" cues for a wind up power attack with multiple release times for different actions. It adds an incredible amount of thoughtless control, without taking away from the game's audio, and enables incredibly responsive combat. It's a very rich stream of information.

The adaptive trigger are on top of that. You can map partial vs full pulls on other controllers via steam input on PC, but actually executing that consistently is difficult for most people. The PS5 controller allows you to actually set a physical breakpoint for a partial pull, or pull through for a different action. It also allows even more information to be communicated through the amount of resistance on the trigger.

I think it's really unfortunate that the launch coincided with Covid killing in store console demo units. Getting hands on with Astro's Playroom would have showed a lot of people just how insanely impressive the tech is.