Yes, I did. It was the first post. They couldn't run a profitable gaming division without collectors. They wouldn't go broke because they have ridiculous cash reserves, but they would have bailed on gaming at some point because collectors are a big chunk of their sales.
People did it because they didn't have a choice. That doesn't mean they were OK with it, or that anyone would have chosen not to have everything instantly available given the choice. That choice exists now.
You don't need to rip cartridges to play them. After the hardware gives out: I'm relying on the piracy community here.
I'd need to rip them to play them now. Carrying around cartridges isn't acceptable. I have no issue relying on data preservation communities to preserve access to my data.
Half those cartridges have junk builds that won't work without external updates by the way. You need the internet to get to the actual functional version regardless.
3DS or Wii can get digital games just fine.
I have no interest in the used market. Even if I could get 90% back on every game every time to abandon access to a game, the fact that it would require carrying physical games would make the value proposition completely unacceptable to me.
They didn't meaningfully innovate on software. They "innovated" on hardware by using a tablet and giving it a dock to make older games viable on handheld that weren't before. Which is fine; it demonstrated the market for handhelds playing real games even with the worst controller the world has ever seen, and kickstarted the steam deck and a bunch of PC copycats. But collectors are their core market. If they do a switch 2 that doesn't do physical games, it will fail.
Physical media has mostly died out. Streaming has almost entirely replaced music, TV, and movies. Ereaders are still growing, but they're also a huge market, and libraries support multiple ebook borrowing apps with different libraries because ebooks are so much of their job now.
Nintendo makes a handful of games a year. Most switch games aren't from Nintendo. Most switch games don't work well without updates. And if you want to talk about how popular the switch specifically is instead of the fact that their core audience is physical collectors, all of the switch's popularity is because it could play third party games.
You don't need Nintendo servers to get digital games.
The used market has massive compromises that you're just ignoring. It doesn't matter if it's "only" 1% chance of a bad transaction. Bad transactions happen, and it's a risk that nullifies much of the benefit if you experience it.