This is about video encoding not about 3D performance…

I played breath of the wild during covid and was just blown away by it, both as a work of art as well as technical brilliance. Knowing the switch's limitations, it felt like a AAA demoscene. I only learned later that the Wii was also a release platform!!!

It was released on the Wii-U. The Wii-U arguably has a better GPU than the Switch due to different power constraints. However, the total CPU/GPU/RAM package is much better on the Switch. I also believe that BotW was developed for the Wii-U, which crashed so quickly that porting it to the Switch made sense.

I played it on the Wii U and outside of some random slowdown (which honestly happened in the Switch version), I had a great time playing it and thought it still looked and played well for such an old system.

Oh come on, Gorons do not look technically worse than in OoT/MM. You might not like the cell shaded characters but that is an artstyle and not a technical limitation and pretending it is is just disingenuous

So your are telling us you never played or even looked to a N64 game.