Switch, not just in sales but in mindshare as well.

PS3 sold eighty-some million units. Wii-U sold like what, thirteen-million? So, it's really not even close. Switch. 

Switch is also the successor to 3DS so that needs to be factored in. On top of that, I don’t think it’s as simple as just looking at hardware sales.

PS3 lost Sony billions of dollars and the company as a whole was on shaky grounds at the time, I remember their credit rating getting downgraded to junk and them selling off a bunch of assets in the early 2010s.

Nintendo may still have the bigger comeback but I think it’s more complex than your post implies.

If Nintendo had repeated the same "success" with the Switch as they had with the Wii U then we'd all be playing Tears of the Kingdom on the PS5.

Ok maybe not that so soon, but they'd be heading in that direction.

That was the first 3 or 4 years when they were bleeding money with Blu Ray. In the end PS3 helped Sony Blu Ray win over HD DVD and Sony were making huge profit from Blu ray. Then when they released the slim PS3 they started making money on each console sold. Second half of PS3 life were their peak years and making profit with GTA5 and the last of us, 2 of the biggest games on PS3. PS3 made a comeback in its last few years and that momentum carried over to the PS4. The Wii U was just a disaster from start to finish selling only 13 millions, it might lost Nintendo less money or made a small profit but still a disaster 

Uh, PS3 wasn't a failure like the Wii U was. So this easily goes to the Switch. Barely selling like 15 million Wii U's to possibly becoming the best-selling console of all time with the Switch is just flat-out no comparison.

The Switch, by far.

PS3 was basically a hiccup for the otherwise powerful PlayStation line, and they had gotten things turned around by the end of the PS3's life cycle and started the PS4 generation from a position of strength.

Switch came on the heels of the Wii U's failure, and Nintendo pulled out all the stops to make it the blockbuster it became, largely based on the power of its characters. Switch has even been holding its own against the PS5 and Series. 

Well, if you want to ignore the sales gap (although, I have no idea why you would), there is still the issue of gamer perception. By the time the PS3 Slim launched, PS3 and the Sony brand was starting to make a come back. Kevin Butler, the IPs that were coming out, coupled with the relative failure of Kinect and Microsoft's sudden decision to try to lure the Wii crowd away... it really swung Playstation around and put them back in a positive light for gamers, and the sales reflected it. 

Compare that to Wii-U, which was a laughing stock and viewed as a failure (do not hate me; I loved my Wii-U then, and I love it now). It was such a failure, in fact, that many were worried Nintendo might completely go under, and in a way, they did. Switch is a handheld which can be docked, not a home console that can be taken on the go, which means Nintendo silently abandoned the dedicated home-console market. So when you consider this, the Switch's success is unbelievable. Literally. No one except the completely deluded among us expected Nintendo to rise back up NES-style and do what they did. 

When PS4 launched, people had already predicted its success. Not so with Switch. So I'm still going with that. It brought Nintendo back from the brink. 

I didn’t say ignore hardware numbers, I said it’s not the only factor to consider and your post is still completely ignoring 3DS.

I agree that Nintendo had the bigger comeback, I just think you are looking at the comparison too narrowly.

Seriously, why is everybody refusing to acknowledge the existence of 3DS in this thread?

You guys are acting like Nintendo sold ~13 million hardware/~100 million software last generation when in reality they sold ~90 million hardware/~500 million software.

Thats still a huge improvement for Switch but it makes no sense to ignore the device that accounted for ~80% of their hardware/software sales last generation.