It was obvious XC projects were in the works for a while because Monolith Soft restructured in 2018 and began a hiring drive for Xenoblade, before another hiring drive for Zelda in 2019. The subject of whether or not there's a new IP has been a tricky one for a while, but the more recent hiring calls were for Xenoblade and Zelda. And, for most of the last 2 years, the public-facing information has been that Takahashi's team had a new Xenoblade in development.
I wouldn't really take what some people were saying online as evidence of what a lot of people thought; it's also not really relevant in discussions with individual users here and it's too close to strawmanning. Neither I nor anyone else here is responsible for generic online discourse, and you shouldn't really expect us to answer for that discourse. It's very unclear what you hope to accomplish by saying "lots of people expected this thing". Sure, OK, but what has that got to do with the conversation in this thread?
This is exactly the kind of strawmanning that we do avoid here. Not everybody posting inside information is the same, and it's counter productive to good conversation to generalise like this. If there's someone you specifically have beef with, then back it up with details instead of this.