Now the main course bugman's hot take
I am several dozen pages behind, but allow me to give my $0.02 on the Bugman's Pokemon game comparison as to why Nintendo would have leverage in court.
To be clear: Nintendo absolutely *is* predatory toward fan projects, but there's a good deal more leniency than people are willing to give credit.
a) Nintendo specifically targets anything that poses a tangible threat to their IPs. If a ROM hack gets popular enough, Nintendo will target it. If an
emulation project poses similar problems, they too will go after it... with caveats since emulation law has precedent in favour of emulators and their developers here in the USA (and maybe Europe/Oceania too?). The shutdown of Citra and Yuzu was terrible, but the Yuzu team in their infinite wisdom were running a paid grift where they were advertising better Switch game compatibility even with Switch games that came out recently (i.e. within 3 months of that Yuzu premium update). Citra was made by the same people who made Yuzu, so that had to go in the cease-and-desist settlement too. Notice, however, that Nintendo hasn't explicitly targeted Azahar, the "continuation" of Citra post-takedown. This is because the Azahar team specifically learned from the Citra/Yuzu team's mistakes, and they also implemented specific measures to avoid anti-piracy lawsuits. You can no longer run encrypted CIAs of 3DS games in Azahar like you could on Citra; they must be decrypted. Yes, you *can* theoretically download encrypted CIAs anywhere and decrypt them with popular open source tools (i.e. CTRTool), but that's an extra step that the Azahar team
does not advertise. There were also some more obtuse changes to the back-end, but I don't immediately recall what they are.
b) Pokemon Showdown throws a huge wrench in the Bugman's analogy because Showdown is explicitly a
battle simulator and
not a full-on recreation of a Pokemon game. You cannot get level up, get gym badges, or challenge the Elite 4 in Pokemon Showdown. You can play with Koraidon and Miraidon in Scarlet/Violet AG, you can test out VGC teams on ladder, but you're not getting the "full" Pokemon experience. There's allegedly some cooperation between Smogon, the Pokemon Showdown developers, and the Pokemon Company International, but it's murky and discussion is often tight-lipped. Either way, Showdown's persisted for more than a decade despite countless other ROM hacks, fan games, emulators, and hosting sites going tits-up within that time period.
Excellent video by Moon Channel on the subject if you wanna learn more. TLDR is that Fagtree's own Discord circlejerk are infinitely more retarded than they let on.