Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition, but after that the other companies were trying to outperform each other in graphical fidelity while Nintendo released basically another Gamecube but with motion controls. And it was a hit!
Folks can quibble about the Gamecube if they like, but step back one generation and they were definitely trying to push the technology.
Most of those kids didn't know what 64-bit meant, but they knew it must be better than their old 16-bit piece of junk. That's 4x the amount of bits, therefore the console was 4x better!
It gets forgotten about because it didn’t sell all that well and because the tiny little 1.8GB discs kept most of the multi-platform blockbusters off it, but the GameCube was significantly more powerful than the PS2 (though not as powerful as the Xbox).
I wish I knew how to find the text of that post. The G4TV forums seem erased from history.
I think that's when they really started leaning into it again, but Gunpei Yokoi (Gameboy inventor) was a big proponent of the idea, which he called "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology". So it's been a part of Nintendos design process for a while before that.
I suppose you could compare to the Neo Geo which was far superior technically, but it was at such a high price point that it never made much of a dent in the market. That generation was pretty much defined by the SNES and Genesis.
