Indies come mostly to the Switch actually because of the Wii U.

Since the AAA and AA publishers jumped ship on that console, Indies had little competition in the console and saw themselves much more in the spotlight than anywhere else. The fact that Nintendo then consequently started pushing them as Nindies also helped setting up Nintendo as a console for Indies, both in the eyes of gamers and of Indie Developers. And to this day Indies mostly sell better on Nintendo than on Playstation or Xbox consoles.

In other terms, Nintendo doesn't really have to do much persuasion to get the indies to their platform or to get them as exclusives, timed or otherwise.

That would have been true even with a Mali or Adreno GPU instead of the NVidia GPU, it would just have been a bit more work to port and optimize the games. And there are quite a few iOS/Android games in the eShop anyway.

Nintendo's relationship with Indie developers and smaller studios has been around for a while, although, since the NES era it has primarily been on their handhelds up until the Wii when an explosion of indie titles and smaller studio titles made their way onto home console. So, and Wii U continued that trend, but in the Switch era it has reached unprecedented levels.

Shantae, which was a landmark title in this regard, was almost 20 years ago.

Anyway, the thread starter is afflicted with a classic case of confirmation bias.

I doubt Nintendo gained much inspiration from Sony/Microsoft when it comes to first party titles. I mean, as far as the last several years, Sony has focused on developing big-budget AAA titles that showcase high end graphics and cinematics along with the gameplay.

Nintendo rarely does that, if ever. Zelda BotW is probably their most expensive game to date and I doubt it’s as expensive as something like GTAV or TLoU part II. And even then, BotW was focused mainly on the gameplay, how to create an interactive open world and redefine Zelda within that space. Mario Odyssey, revisits the sandbox elements of Mario 64 and Sunshine and gives it a unique twist with Mario moving like he has never had before. ARMS, takes on the arena fighting genre with motion controls (optional) and establishes somewhat of a lore akin to Splatoon, which is a unique take on online multiplayer shooters. And games like Xenoblade 2, Fire Emblem Three Houses, and Pokemon have likely AA budgets. I don’t think they’re inspired by anything Sony has done on PS4 or even Vita.

Something often overlooked is Nintendo used to use their own API with GX and GX2. Thankfully Switch uses NVN from Nvidia which supports OpenGL and Vulkan. Getting UE4 was also huge.

Sorry for the double post but in bold is untrue. ARMS is a watered-down Virtual On and there is a new Virtual On that released on PS4. Your overall post is valid tho.