This sort of behavior out of Nintendo isn't new. They've done things like locking difficulty modes behind paywalls before, see BotW's DLC, and amiibo were basically just ways of locking content behind more paywalls, that they then DELIBERATELY made incredibly hard to find for no reason whatsoever (see getting Epona in BotW). The reason the N64 used cartridges and the gamecube used those stupid microdisk things was because Nintendo wanted to be able to make more money off of game developers.
People just ignore it this stuff when Nintendo does it because they like NIntendo's first party games, so make excuses.
To grab the EA comparison, look at all the excuses people made up about Bioware games over the past decade as those steadily got worse and more crap snuck in.