The fact that there are two examples of them doing separately purchased classic releases since the launch of NSO sort of suggests that they’re not done doing them.
Also, few of Nintendo’s classic games have as much value or as much of a built-in audience as classic Pokémon. Nintendo is a business. Pokémon R/G/B/Y with built-in Pokémon Home support is something that they could sell and it would sell well.
Why? I keep seeing people say this and it doesn’t make any sense at all to me. Why on Earth would Nintendo say “well, we can’t include Pokémon as part of Game Boy NSO, guess we might as well just cancel the whole thing and leave all those other Game Boy games to rot.” The Game Boy had essentially a full console generation before Pokémon arrived. Classic Nintendo franchises like Kirby and even Wave Race got their start on Game Boy, and many Nintendo franchises saw key installments on the platform. Adding the system would still be a value add for NSO even without Pokémon.
I mean, they added Genesis to NSO, for christ’s sake. I don’t see a world where it makes sense to add Genesis to NSO, but the system with Metroid II and Donkey Kong ‘94 doesn’t earn its keep as a worthwhile addition to Nintendo’s classic games library without Pokémon.
Pokémon is sort of exception for Nintendo in a lot of ways, since they don’t wholly own or control it. The Pokémon releases on 3DS were not part of the Game Boy Virtual Console program, they were higher-priced “premium” releases. I don’t see why “they’ll do the same thing they just did on the 3DS a few years ago” is somehow hard to believe.