Burying one's head in the sand is an awful reaction to just about anything. If I had done what you said, I would have remained uninformed on this topic because it is about a Lemmy user, and no other place would have provided the answer to this information.
I am glad someone else responded with a basic summary of their assessment of the situation. There is, of course, more to the story, but from the summary I can see that it is as I thought, something that is completely meaningless to me and has zero influence on anything I currently do or plan to do. I didn't even know this question was about a Lemmy user, I thought it was about like Dragon Riders of Pern's author, or perhaps a FATE character's design or voice actor or something because I have very minimal knowledge of FATE but that sounds like it could be a character from FATE. Not that any of that is all that important to me either, but those topics are still far more important to me than personal social-political bickering in an online forum.
Upon learning this information, I can now drop interest in the topic and not wonder what the question was asking about.
The NES was extremely dominant among the gamer population with home consoles at the time, which was pretty small. Some gamers may have already owned an Atari, or ColecoVision, or MagnaVox, or other console and did not feel the need to buy an NES. However, the NES was so popular that people rushing to buy it for their children were disappointed that it was sold out. You never read or heard about this phenomenon happening with any other video game console at the time, because it did not happen at the same scale as the NES.
Of course the NES did not sell as well as the PS2 or Wii, because by the time those consoles released, the general population of gamers had greatly increased, naturally more people would buy those consoles. The same goes for the Switch outselling the Wii and WiiU, the general population of gamers has increased. It would not be entirely surprising to see the Switch 2 outsell the Switch for this very same reason, assuming the global economy improves enough to encourage luxury spending on the same level of when the Switch released.
Personally, my gaming began with a Super Nintendo. I never had SEGA or Sony consoles growing up. Nintendo up until the Xbox came out, then I had Nintendo and Xbox. And PC. Then the Switch released and it collected dust for so much time I decided to sell it and just keep my PC and Xbox.
I don't feel like I missed out growing up, but I do enjoy being able to play games on those platforms I did not play. Some of them were good, but I find a lot of them are subpar compared to what Nintendo and Xbox had.