You’re not wrong, but it could just be as simple as Nintendo leaving us crumbs to follow. And in the history of gaming, it won’t be the first time someone went into a race or level with the wrong type of gear for the situation. And who knows, maybe snowmobiles make for great sand hoppers. 

Sure, assuming the sand isn't packed down too much, but it'd be insane to try driving a snowmobile on asphalt like where the starting line is.

One of the people complaining was someone on digital foundry and later I found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I6iydbep2M from Sungrand studios, he talked about Mario Kart 9 using physical based shaders that would have caused the switch fps to take a hit, the more varied and higher res textures that make use of the Switch 2 greater amount of RAM. He also talked about its use of Volumetric lighting, draw distance and the quality of shadows. On Digital foundry they barely went over any of that.  Now it was an initial impression and not an analysis video for Digital foundry, but if it is hard for even people known for graphics analysis to notice these things we really have reached the point of diminishing returns.

Now I am wondering if it would be possible to have these effects that wouldn’t be possible on the Switch with a decent frame rate of 60 fps 4 player split screen on Switch 2? It would be great to have the option to race against real people online instead of CPUs if you have 3 or 4 people and a team mode facilitated by the 24 racers would be interesting.