I've also heard "Dreamcast died to piracy", seemingly forgetting that the Wii could be soft-modded within a year of release (Twilight Hack) and despite that, still printed money for several years afterward.
I think Twilight Hack came about in the Wii's second or third year. There wasn't really much you could do with it in the earliest days, and I remember having to use it to just boot right into whatever homebrew software you wanted to use, and manually having to pop the SD card and change text files every time you wanted to run different software. That's on top of having to boot into Twilight Princess, load the save file, and all. It was a hassle.
On top of that, I remember weird problems, like, I think only being able to use a Gamecube controller to play proof-of-concept emulators. It wasn't really worth it to hack your Wii until it had matured and fallen out of popularity, anyway. The hacking scene wasn't nearly as snappy as it is today, with a big rush to throw Retroarch onto everything. No, you had to play an emulator named something like PENISNES by xXxSePhIr0tHkIlLa69xXx, with a wallpaper of an anime girl in a swimsuit, and it doesn't run half your roms, and you can't change any settings, and the A and B buttons are swapped on your controller, and you can't exit without pulling the power plug.
Alongside PENISNES would be a janky source port of Doom that demands a USB keyboard and the documentation won't actually tell you where exactly you're supposed to drop doom.wad, and then extremely rudimentary experimental games like Pong, made only because whomever programmed that wanted to dip their toes into the water of this fresh new system. I'm not being literal with those examples, but that's more or less the experience of being on the absolute cutting edge of console hacking back in the day.
Dreamcast hacking took off so hard because of how it worked. Sega had some tech with VCDs where you could run software through them, but that software didn't have to be signed. Turns out, anything run that way had full access to the system, so you could just use it to circumvent Sega's anti-piracy efforts. So then, every scene release had each game's boot process rolled to boot that way, and then we could all just download a .cdi of our favorite games and run them, no problem. It is such a stupid security hole. Even PSP wasn't that bad.
