Nintendo apparently has started (or has been for years? I do not know) selling access to old games via their eShop thing, which would be why they are going hog wild on ROMs, they want to make sure there is no alternative to get your nostalgia fix other than forking over more money for games that are old enough to drink.
Nintendo never needed an e-shop to resell old games. They have been doing it ever since the Gameboy Advance:
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The Wii/DSi e-shop was the first time they sold ROMs through Virtual Console. They even paid other companies to convince them to have them sell their ROMs on there. Nintendo took a price cut from the sales, but it was almost a no-brainer for them.
Later, they gave free retro ROMs as a little gift to 3DS owners that bought their system before they cut the price. However with the Wii U, instead of building upon the existing Wii VC that already had more than 400 games, they decided to start over from scratch, with a "new", different Virtual Console that was selling fewer, and sometimes, the same games, at a higher price. A pretty confusing move, since you could still transfer and access Wii Virtual Console games on the Wii U (from Wii mode, I guess they were banking on the conveniency of not having to press 3 extra buttons) if you bought them already. Nevertheless, they added different consoles and games and it was a pretty neat knickknack to keep the users busy.
Now if you look at the Switch, they're doing a 3RD Virtual Console, but this time it's subscription based so you don't even own the games. And some of them are locked behind the "expansion pack". From what I've also heard on release some (N64?) games they put on there were broken, but they've fixed them.
The Wii had more Virtual Console games than the Wii U and after 7 years, the Wii U still has more virtual console games than the Switch.
There's no point in indulging with this. Torrenting thousands of NES, SNES, GBA, etc. ROMs is faster and easier than giving Nintendo your credit card details for a subscription. Plus, Nintendo would never be brave enough to sell Super Mario 14, would they?
