Sith a userbase of 120 Million +, Nintendo will be well prepared to support Switch for some time. There will be some mew games(AA) if not even cross- gen ( AAA). Also with Remasters like Advance Wars, Metroid Prime, Kid Ikarus or F- Zero, Switch won't feel hollow at all.
From a first party perspective, I don’t think it makes sense for Nintendo to make almost anything exclusive for 2 years after a new device launches. If the pitch for the new hardware is mostly it’s visuals, they should focus on compelling new generation improvements not exclusivity. New customers buying the existing Switch aren’t going to be the same demographic of consumers, and ongoing software sales in that platform serve them well.
That said, third parties may expect to see a strong effort to drive adoption of the new hardware, and exclusive content does matter in that regard. Personally I’m not sure I care about exclusives, as I think Nintendo’s EPD games look like they’d scale very well with small adjustments in detail. Games they develop with their partners I’m less certain about - Platinum for instance could probably benefit from dropping OG Switch.
Nintendo is the only company that I can think of that would 100% do the following scenario:
Wii launches with Zelda in 2006: HUGE SUCCESS
Wii gets a new Zelda in 2011
Wii U launches in 2012 with no new Zelda in site.... system bombs historically...
Switch launches with Zelda in 2017: HUGE SUCCESS
Switch gets a new Zelda in 2023
Switch 2 launches in 2024 with no new Zelda in site ...... ???????
I’ve long been a proponent of Zelda not making sense to launch before new hardware, but we simply don’t know what they have in store for 2023 and beyond. *
There exists the possibility that they’ll release both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom later with new generation updates, and they will probably sell incredibly well. Nintendo has run out of Wii U content to pad out their calendars, so unless they’ve really improved their output, they’ll need to take a new approach - something like more remasters and remakes, both from GCN as we’re getting rumors of, but perhaps even from Switch.
Edit: and to add to this, If new hardware was planned for this year and cancelled as DF seems to be implying, there was almost certainly
intent to use Zelda to boost it. I’m going to assume it wasn’t some backwards decision that got them to the cancellation, but rather some major roadblock - perhaps Nvidia promised something performance and quality wise that they couldn’t deliver on. No idea.