alt Hacker NewsI have no love for Nintendo's litigiousness, but the reason to believe they'd leave you alone if you refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles is that they've left alone developers who refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles. Emulators for everything before the Switch are still widely available and untouched by Nintendo. Even Yuzu, the Switch emulator Nintendo lawfare'd out of existence, lasted six years - almost entirely contemporary to the hardware - until they flew too close to the sun by soliciting donations to the tune of hundreds-of-thousands per year and encouraging piracy of TotK at launch.
Citra (3DS) shut down with Yuzu. So not exactly. And Ryujinx did not take donations nor encourage piracy of TotK at launch, yet met a similar fate.
Regardless, for previous generations included, work on emulators and hacking consoles happened when the console was still current, of course.
You can’t start the reverse engineering work only after the console is superseded, by then it is too late for preservation, especially with live service games.