Back then I hadn’t yet gotten into video games as much as I am today, so I hadn’t heard of Samus, Fox, Kirby, Ness, or Captain Falcon. I might not have known about Link at first, either; I can’t remember if I had been exposed to Ocarina of Time before Smash Bros. or not. Pretty sure I only learned that he was named Link from Smash, though.
Embarrassingly, at first I had thought that Kirby was supposed to secretly be a Pokémon; I was just a kid, after all, and my cousin (who was the one who exposed me to Smash in the first place, since he had the game and I didn’t) had told me a rumor that Kirby was supposed to be the Pokémon that MissingNo. was a stand-in for, essentially. I guess it made sense to me as a Pokémon-obsessed kid, and MissingNo.’s Normal/Flying typing (well, I believe it was actually Normal/“Bird”, but the belief was that the “Bird” type was a proto-Flying type, so it still made sense to me) seemed to match with Kirby as well. That and there were the similarities between Kirby and Jigglypuff, too. Of course, it wouldn’t be long before I encountered an actual Kirby game and realized all of that was clearly false, lol.
Trophies were probably a huge resource hog and I get why they got simplified and then scrapped, but some of the magic (namely, the vision of Smash as a Nintendo Museum) was lost.
Spirits fill the same role now, though. Yes, they’re not 3D models, and yes, they don’t have text descriptions like trophies did, but they do have spirit battles as a fun way to provide additional context, and there are far more spirits than there ever were trophies. Speaking as someone who was introduced to the greater world of Nintendo specifically through Smash Bros., and especially via Melee’s trophies, I honestly believe that Ultimate’s spirits do just as well of a job (if not a better job entirely) of introducing people to the wider world of Nintendo. After all, times are different now; in 2001 the internet wasn’t nearly as accessible as it is today, and we didn’t have wikis for virtually everything like we do now either. As such, providing a description for each trophy was kind of necessary. But these days, if a particular spirit catches your interest, you’re probably just gonna look it up on your smartphone, anyway. So the end result is more or less the same, except there are far more spirits now than there were trophies then, plus they have an interactive element to them in spirit battles, too.