FWIW the price performance ratio of older consoles was better than what you get today. It was impossible to find a high definition video player for under $1000, except for the Xbox. People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Today, you can buy a raspberry pie for $40. I think that must have something to do with the fading of homebrew.
Gimmicks and ease-of-hacking also matter IMO.
With the Switch, I believe we are seeing the "threat model" (from Nintendo's PoV) shift from on-device hacking to emulation, which is far more scalable and resilient to vuln fixes (system only needs to be hacked "once" to get crypto secrets and to dump code). This enables large-scale piracy and high financial stakes, see the ToTK debacle.
On the other hand, there's no (?) handheld system with 3D like the 3DS; and playing DS/3DS games on emulator feels a bit awkward.
The only thing I'm using my hacked Switch 1 is to dump/restore save files. Thanks to cloud saves and local save transfer, my other Switch units don't need to be hacked.