Too many people living in lalaland in threads like this still thinking they're living in 2005.
The economics of hardware has dramatically changed especially the last 10 years.
Gamers have had it ridiculously good for too long, getting hardware under cost in many cases in the past, that's all over now, things like even node shrinks are massively expensive these days. Sony has no incentive to lose money on hardware any more and Microsoft is basically out of the game. PC GPU prices are way higher than they used to be.
You want something these days, you pay for it. The days of asking/whining for $500 worth of tech for $300 is long over. Stuff like the XBox 360 or even what the N64 was for its day ... is over. Switch 2 is quite good hardware for $450, even though it likely was delayed by about a year due to COVID impacting the software pipeline. That's the bottom line.
The only massively underpowered consoles that Nintendo has ever released really were the Wii and Wii U, and those systems were obviously marketed and aimed heavily towards casual audiences.
The NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, Switch, and now Switch 2 all have reasonable hardware for their time of release (1983, 1990, 1996, 2001, 2017, and 2025 respectively) given their form factors as well. The handheld only line of Game Boy to DS obviously is a different story, but the Switch 1/2 are considered consoles by Nintendo.
