I'm really glad to see that these new consoles will continue to have ethernet ports. My whole tv cabinet is full of devices that need networking and its nice to keep as many devices as possible on ethernet and off the wifi network.
That being said.. I am gaming on wifi regularly and have no in-game issues related to it (low ping, stable connection, same room as the router, 5Ghz band only used by the machine on which I game + work machine, but those don't happen at the same time).
I've used Steam Link on a computer in my living room running Wifi to the internal router that runs a wire to the receiving TV. My wifi is one of those dedicated mesh router things that is as solid as you can buy. And it mostly works... but still has occasional jank and even more occasional bad days where it never stops working but noticeably drops resolution a lot.
It's just too easy for an otherwise functional home Wiki connection on its own to eat all the latency budget or more for that style of gaming. And the companies really want you locked into more subscriptions, not owning your games, and streaming everything if at all possible, so I'm sure they'll continue building the hardware for it. Ethernet is cheap; not so cheap you can't save a lot of money over several million consoles, but so cheap that it's a no-brainer for this purpose; retaining one marginal customer on the cloud service that works on ethernet but not on their wifi pays for hundreds of ethernet ports, if not thousands.
Regarding Nintendo, while they've never shipped a console with an Ethernet port built-in, they have supported it since the GameCube (Broadband Adapter); the Wii, Wii U, and Switch all accept standard USB Ethernet dongles. Use of these adapters is somewhat widespread on the Switch, particularly for Mario Maker and Smash (although this is more due to Nintendo's incompetency with netcode than inherent latency in Wi-Fi).
For downloading games though, heck. 25GB is like a minimum now, and some go north of 100GB.
If you live somewhere with a crowded Wi-Fi spectrum you'll have connectivity issues daily.
...unless you live in a rural area. I’d hate to download a 50GB day 1 patch on 5mb/s DSL
Games don't need bandwidth when playing multiplayer, they need stable jitter and no packet loss.
Unless you live in a rural area.
Or literally anywhere in Australia.
> If you live somewhere with a crowded Wi-Fi spectrum you'll have connectivity issues daily.
Like everyone who lives in a city does.
Maybe so for competitive, realtime games; certainly wired will generally be lower latency, all other things being equal.
I expect mainline consoles will have a hardwire option (ethernet or otherwise) forever. There are game genres (like fighting games) that are latency sensitive and it would kill the competitive scene for that console if Wifi was the only option available.