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Soundwave on 18 June 2024
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The Mariko model can clock higher, it's not really some kind of weird "mod" ... the chip can comfortably hit those clock speed without a problem. The fan as I've said doesn't even hit 50% speed, stays around 45% max on Mariko models when overclocked. The Mariko at the higher clocks IS what that chip should be running at.

The Mariko also maintains a solid 3-4+ hour battery life when clocked higher, which already was accepted as good on the OG Switch.

There's a very, very good probability that Nintendo meant to allow this to be a 4K/Pro model of the Switch, we can see for ourselves the 4K out on the dock was added so was DP lane changes to the chipset to allow 4K/60.

When they realized they didn't need a Pro/4K and it would in fact make selling a Switch 2 harder, I think they quickly pivoted and simply slapped an OLED display on it and called it a day, but we can see the 4K modifications they made in the dock and on the chip itself.

This is what Miyamoto said about HD on the Wii too:

“I felt like I wanted to go to HD sooner.
Even for the Wii, no matter how much it made the system cost, it would have been great if it were HD in the first place. However, it was going to take some time for HD televisions to become common and we felt that until that point was reached, there would have been no point for Wii to be HD.
From our point of view, once the subsequent generation to Wii came around, HD televisions would be more common and we felt it would be time to make our games in HD then. However, HD became more common about 2 to 3 years earlier than we had anticipated. A main part of that was that the prices for HD televisions manufactured overseas had gone down at an unthinkable pace.
So, as a result, while we were right in the middle of selling the Wii, the TVs in people’s living rooms (in Japan) were slowly becoming HD sets. Overseas especially people had never so rapidly and drastically changed their hardware to the newest technology but in America as well HD TVs became standard little by little.”

In early 2017 when the Switch was launching 4K TV adoption was at like 20% of TVs only, so it makes entire sense that to avoid a repeat of the Wii their plan then was to have a Pro/4K model in the back half of the product cycle (thus avoiding the mistake of the Wii). COVID simply totally changed the entire outlook of the generation, not only was there no decline in Switch sales momentum in the back half of its product cycle, the sales surge from COVID onwards has propelled the system to higher than average sales from year 3 onwards.

It's like the system hit age 3, and then froze its normal aging process for 2 years as COVID lockdowns caused a massive boom for Switch hardware sales.