There was a bad experience version you could use without a subscription to games you purchased outright, and they included "free" games with your subscription, but to get a reasonable experience you had to pay for both.
I could see the utility of the textured surface if it has the durability, but holy hell does it look bad if it's actually just cut in half for colors like that.
If that's just for demonstration and the split is more naturally contoured, maybe it's OK.
Doom looked awful on the switch. It took an extremely heavy dose of adaptive resolution, with a bunch of effects rendered at 360p, and heavy motion blur just to get the game to function at 30FPS.
And it's a game that uses very careful design to run extremely well on very old PC hardware.
You can't compare a console to an Android tablet. They didn't give developers any reason to target the shield tablet; of course there weren't going to be any games. And the built in controllers to make it a handheld were what made the switch the switch anyways.
Switch games never at any point looked current gen. They could support some games with current gen mechanics, in a handheld form factor. The switch had no path to success if it wasn't a handheld. There are some people who only use it docked, but nowhere near enough that it was remotely possible to build enough momentum for third party support.
Microsoft has their own strengths. If they had made the Switch, there would have been less compelling first party games, but there would have been a lot more early third party buy in and it would have been a wash. Ultimately the fact that it was a viable handheld capable of some meaningful 3D worlds would have sold it.
The fact that you can "play them" without spending money doesn't change the fact that every single element of every single feature is designed to make you want to spend money, and every interaction with every menu has ads shoved down your face.
There is exactly one design conceit for live service games, and it's "rob every player you can blind". It's the exact business model of every single one. There are zero exceptions.
If that hardware was the first handheld gaming device capable of playing some small selection of 3D current gen games? It absolutely would have been successful.
Being Nintendo didn't make the Wii U successful, because it was the worst piece of shit anyone's ever made. The switch was successful because it was a good handheld.
Because literally every live service game ever made goes out of their way to constantly dictate your engagement with it in a way that is exclusively designed for the sole purpose of taking money from you.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
Who's angry? It's not game developer's fault that it has 10% of the power needed to run a modern game.
There is no amount of optimization that could make most modern games run on the switch. It has nothing to do with laziness. If you were a first party making games built from the ground up to be comparable to other modern games, it could not be done.
There's a reason Nintendo leans hard into simple physics and extremely arcade style sports games, and it's not just to be more accessible to casual fans. It's because it's literally all the hardware can do.
It's not something that's close to regular for space games, either. I can name one game off the top of my head that has it (No Man's Sky), and there's very little else going for it. That one feature combined with endless planets less interesting than Starfield's is close to the whole game.
But it actually is obscenely underpowered, even for mobile, and the CPU is a massive limitation that keeps the vast majority of last gen games from being possible.
It changed the space by showing low end open world games on handheld were possible, but it hit its ceiling extremely quickly. There's a reason most AAA games didn't support it, and it's because it isn't capable.
So the way I play, I bought a silenced rifle early and spent my perks on stealth and ballistics. Most humans a few levels above me are single headshots from stealth or 2-3 shots once they know where I am. To me, that TTK feels pretty good, and I tend to be able to use space to attack at range and the boost pack for position.
I could see other approaches feeling less good, but that specific style feels pretty comparable to the later Deus Ex games I liked or Cyberpunk, but with better mobility.
I don't love the spaceship combat, at least that I've played so far (though it's been kind of minimal through 20 hours), but I don't like many. The only exception I can think of that really clicked for me was star citizen with a full stick and throttle, and I don't love most others, so I can't really evaluate that super well. I definitely don't think it's the focus, but it's weird that people expected stuff that only a very small handful of pretty pure space sims do and they never promised (flying down to planets). I don't love the number of loading screens, but on steam deck the length isn't awful, so I live with them.
What's your point? It's absolutely possible to make fun games that are simple and not demanding.
It's also extremely limiting. The vast majority of recent games can't possibly be made to run on anything anywhere close to as underpowered as the Switch.