What's your favourite era of Nintendo consoles when grouped by game medium; cartridge era (NES/SNES/N64) optical disc era (Gamecube/Wii/Wii U) or game card era (Switch 1/2) and why?

Note: This is specifically favourite console grouping by medium, not preferred medium itself.

Carts. Tough as nails, require very little maintenance compared to discs, pretty much zero load times, can save your data and well... they're just more fun!

Cartridge by far! No load times. The downside is price. I can't deny that. However I esp love SEGA Genesis carts shape and clamshell boxes. Thick manuals and Gunstars Heroes came with a fruit rollup! TMNTII on NES came with a free pizza! I never liked disc media much because easy to scratch and disc rot can be an issue. Switch carts don't have installs but still long load times, something old games didn't really have with very few exceptions. Not to mention durable. You can beat the shit out of carts and usually still work. May need to use a Q tip to clean the contacts but that's usually it. My 35 year old save of Super Mario World on SNES is still holding a charge somehow lol

Cartridge era by a huge margin.

Switch was great but that alone isn't close to enough to beat the cartridge era. Not sure if you're counting handhelds or not, but NES/SNES/N64 combined trounces the Switch and the piddling current S2 library. Get back to this question at the end of Switch 2's lifetime when cards and cartridges will have had about the same length run.

Optical disk is definitely the worst.
GC arguably had some missed quality (at the very least Sunshine is easily the worst 3D Mario game, and Zelda on both GC and Wii didn't live up to the legendary standards before and after those years, tho WW is pretty cool and unique), while third parties were good again that gen but it was mostly just mutliplat stuff available everywhere so those mostly don't stand out as unique compared to say the SNES exclusive third party offerings. GC did have some real treasures though, definitely more than the Wii. Wii was cool with the motion controls but a lot of that ended just being tacked on waggle control rather than really turning out improved games with unique experiences, but it at least made for fun party games. Wii will go down with only a handful of great historically memorable games, mostly limited to Wii Sports and the two Galaxy games. And well, WiiU was the WiiU.

Just like The Legend of Zelda, I purchased my first Genesis game before I actually got my hands on the console - almost a week before with Genesis, just because I wanted something to marvel at in the meantime before Christmas (still got my Genesis early though because I couldn't wait).  Very impressed with the clam shell design:

Maybe should have explained this differently; I meant which group of consoles is your fav, not specifically if you like cartridges better than disc or vice versa.
My bad.

Digital via SD express. I hate dealing with physical.

So the switch family.  Digital is the best thing to happen to gaming.

Yeah I was surprised how heavily weighted the poll is to nes/SNES/N64 but I think most of the votes are people not understanding it has nothing to do with which physical media you prefer lol.

I went with GameCube/Wii. Switch is great too but it's far too early in Switch 2 life for that group to win yet for me.

Luckily my answer is still Switch and Switch 2.  

From my POV, cartridge era, both my medium and actual consoles:

- cartridges (though expensive) had ability to add extra hardware features to console, which was lost in all follow up media
- actual consoles (specifically NES and SNES) are IMO best that Nintendo has ever done with hardware, comparative to where other players in the market were at the time.