>>713077014There are Switch 1 games that look better, but the main gimmick of destructable terrain means there's a ceiling on how good you can make the environment look without killing your performance.
Most maps are compiled which means their texture work, brush logic, lightmaps, cubemaps, etc are all prebaked so it's less work for the rendering unit later, and this also has the knock-on effect of helping with data throughput.
If your entire level (or most of it) consists of physics objects which will be torn apart by Donkey Kong instead of compiled static bodies, it can only look so good.
I don't like it but this is the real technical reason.
t. AA game dev