This is disingenuous. A multitude of people had issue with the Series S and thought it was a bad idea from the beginning. It has less RAM, less memory bandwidth, and a less powerful GPU than the Xbox One X. Now MS is going to have the same issue as last gen, a boat anchor low end console hampering the high end model. Except last time they were trying to make the best of a bad situation. This time knowingly caused this predicament. The pandemic delayed the issue for them or this would have reared it's head sooner.

Edit: MS requires both the S and X to be supported. 3rd parties can't drop the Xbox Series S. They'd have skip Xbox altogether.

That would simply not be the case or the game would also struggle at 1440p 30 fps on both PS5 and SeriesX. As long as the game target 4k@60 no reaon it should not run at least at 1080P@60 on series S with assets correctly adjusted for this target.

Way more realist to think game/engine will be better optimised when they drop last gen requirement and that it will actually be beneficial to the Series S.

Last gen boat anchor were dur to the cpu being underwhelming from the get go. The series S has the same cpu as the series X. Ram and bandwith are non issue since the assets are also les memory intensive unless game dev decide to use 4k assets and downscale them runtime but that would be the case of bad optimization on the dev part.

I remember a lot of people claiming the Series S was more powerful than the PS5 and that it would run games at 1440/30fps or 1080/60fps easily.

Almost 3 years later, we have a lot of games running at 900/30fps and with a lot of fps dips. 

A handful of random people who were more than likely trolling or really dumb. It certainly wasn't the majority. People say stupid shit all the time, believing it is another story. 

Your examples are some poorly optimized games, and some claims that never confirmed anything about it being a Series S issue for co-op. There could be a handful of other issues and we may never know. Should we also include on this list the "dev" who turned out to not actually work on Gotham Knights, too? The only theme I'm finding is poor optimization and misleading information, followed by people parroting it like its fact. Will devs need to consider the Series S when making a game? Yeah of course, but that goes for all systems. So far, I've failed to see any game so far that made me think it couldn't run on it.

The Series S will be fine this gen.

"And as we get bigger and better games.."

Okay, these are the highest rated games this year. Please explain to me how developers need more power to make "better" games?

Fun fact, here we have two open world 3rd person action adventure games, one was designed with the Wii U in mind, the other one was "designed for PS5."

Who gives a shit? Not the 120 million playing Switch games at 720p30 at least.

The Series S will be around for the entire generation I am afraid. It's the best selling Xbox console currently.

Just expect resolution and framerate cutbacks more often and more severely.

The difference between X and S is far larger than the Switch Docked vs Undocked.

For example, the Switch doesn't loose 60% of it's Ram, it's Ram bandwidth doesn't increase by 150% going from undocked to docked... Which impacts the texture and pixel fillrate of the GPU.

I do agree that the Series S will be targeting a lower visual bar, so it can get away with less hardware, but the Switch comparison isn't even in the same ballpark.

On paper. Black and white specs don't always tell the entire story.

The Series S has more modern, more efficient hardware. It can do more for every Gigabyte of bandwidth and Ram than the One X.

How? AMD improved delta colour compression, added primitive shaders, reduced cache pressures to get more out of tile-based immediate rendering... And that means it can do more with it's limited bandwidth pool.

The fast SSD allows for far more effective asset streaming, so less data needs to be kept in DRAM.

In short, majority of games end up looking better or performing better than the One X. Polaris is just garbage from an efficiency standpoint.

Series S is 25%-35% the real world "power" of the much more popular counterpart and the inevitable industry standard, the PS5. Digital Foundry is already calling for Microsoft to stop mandating it, which is what I predicted before the generation started and got accused of "console warring" for it. Some of the same people who defended and glorified this thing will thank Microsoft for ditching it as a requirement down the road. Mandating it would only lead to more "moneyhatted" PS5 exclusives. The "power doesn't matter" crowd are in for a rude awakening. Microsoft isn't Nintendo and Xbox isn't a hybrid.

On the flip side, Switch 2's existence may future proof Series S to some extent, since its GPU power is rumoured to be around that level. In other words, some developers won't think "Series S is holding us back for a small return" but rather think "Series S and Switch 2 have too large of a combined active install base to ignore." In that sense, Series S and Switch 2 might assist each other.

Regardless, if Series S remains mandated all gen, expect more games to skip Xbox altogether in a similar fashion to PS4 games skipping Switch 1. Also expect a lot of horribly optimized games that just exist to meet Microsoft's on paper requirements. A Cyberpunk 2077 galore.