It's because it's a short marketing cycle, there aren't any 3rd party related leaks, while insiders are continuing to talk about unannounced Switch titles.
In October of 2015, the WSJ did initial reporting on the NX's hybrid nature. That report speculated a lot and inaccurately, but the core claim was "devs working with devkits say they're having to support some sort of handheld mode" which was accurate. This was a year in advance of Nintendo's planned launch, and was a clear indication that Nintendo had started to line up launch and post-launch support.
Nothing of the kind has emerged in the last six months. I've often said that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But extraordinary claims also require extraordinary proof. "Uncharted territory", the short marketing timeline, and known/reliably rumored future Switch releases don't rule out a 2023 launch, but they do make a 2023 launch extraordinary.
The Official Oldpuck Prediction(tm) is, jokingly, leap day next year. Unofficially, I'll say that Nintendo is clearly in Uncharted Territory, objectively speaking, and so I don't trust Patterns, and I don't think there is enough Data to speculate.
To play devil's advocate, if Nintendo released [redacted] this year, people would be talking about the 2021 Bloomberg "4K Switch" reporting in the same way we're talking about WSJ's 2015 "hybrid" NX article.
I think part of the issue is that we have so little data altogether. We don't have any developer leaks about new hardware, but we also have remarkably few developer leaks at all. Outside of Nintendo's 3 (soon to be 2) announced games, the only other Nintendo title we reliably know is in development is the Fire Emblem remake, which iirc was datamined. Outside of that we have some vague unsubstantiated rumours from individual sources. The most likely of these are Wind Waker and Twilight Princess ports, which would be handled by an outside studio and may already be complete. We have less of an idea of what Nintendo's working on than at any time since the NES.
We know a bit more about third party releases, with several outstanding announced titles, but I'm not aware of any unannounced, but reliably leaked third party Switch games. Admittedly I'm probably out of the loop in that regard, but Nintendo appears to be keeping a remarkably tight lid on forthcoming software, and so do third parties.
Meanwhile we've basically stopped hearing anything about Nintendo hardware from the press. Mochizuki, who wrote both the aforementioned 2015 WSJ NX article and the 2021 4K Switch reporting, had pretty continuously reported on forthcoming hardware for years, including the first few years of the Switch. While he often made inaccurate assumptions, he clearly had some good sources, as he had some of the earliest reporting about the Mariko Switch, Switch Lite and OLED model, even if he misrepresented them in some cases. However, for the past year and a half he's gone silent on future Nintendo hardware. I'm not trying to argue that no news is good news in this case, but no news is definitely
odd, when for the first four and a half years of the system (including after the OLED release) there was a continuous stream of reporting on future hardware. Leaks stopped at pretty much the time you'd expect them to start.
From separate channels, we know way more about the hardware than we ever have before a prior console launch, while simultaneously knowing very little about the context around that hardware, such as games, system positioning, release window, etc. We can infer some of those things from what we know about the hardware, but we're operating on exactly the opposite basis we usually do, where we hear that Nintendo are going to release a new console and then have to guess what kind of hardware they'll use.
While a 2023 launch would absolutely be extraordinary, I'd argue that the current situation is already extraordinary. We know significantly less than we ever have about what Nintendo's working on, either from themselves or the usual sources. We also have a new leadership team, most of whom haven't been involved in the initial announcement of any previous generation of hardware, and they keep talking about being in "uncharted territory" with the Switch.
I feel like we're approaching the event horizon of a black hole; no information is going to escape no matter how hard you look. At some point something's got to give, though, unless Nintendo's planning a future of exclusively shadow-dropped games and hardware. My view is that Nintendo will have to have an event in either June or early July, at which point they either announce a bunch of Switch games, or new hardware (or both). If we get to Pimin 4's release without any game announcements then my money switches to this being an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Whether the new hardware is actually going to be released this year I have no idea. Ignoring all the secondary sources (or lack thereof) for a minute, the primary sources we have from Nvidia, in the form of the hack and various Linux commits, point to T239 being made specifically for a Nintendo device which was planned to launch in 2023, and was planned to do so as recently as last year. If we ask "what time of year are consoles typically planned to launch?" the answer is usually Q4, so a plan for a Q4 2023 launch seems reasonable. Of course it's always possible that it could be delayed, with the Switch being delayed from Q4 to Q1 to improve the software lineup. I could see a similar thing happening here, potentially moving into the first half of next year. In any case I think we're firmly in the realm of the extraordinary.