It was going to die for the reasons I said in the OP, it was a bunch of indie devs with little experience promising something the scale not even Rockstar managed with GTA V, they had over a thousand people work on that game and it wasn't close to the scale NMS was being hyped to be.
As for Nintendo's biggest failings you're looking at the Wii U and the Virtual Boy. You can easily see where they fucked up with those, the Wii U was primarily shit marketing, the system itself was good but it sold so poorly no dev wanted to do anything with it so no games meant no further sales. They even took way too long to get their own console movers out.
This time they've got their console mover day one and they spent a lot of time telling people exactly what it is, no confusion of thinking it's an add-on to the Wii this time, for example. They've shown they know exactly what went wrong with the Wii U and have fixed it this time around.
As for the Virtual Boy, they were 20 years too early, that's it, VR is in full swing now. Funnily enough they actually did that a second time, Luigi's Mansion was designed for 3D TVs, the problem is they took way longer to come out than Nintendo expected. Luckily they were able to properly revisit that idea with the 3DS and the sequel.
I just don't think others should suffer because NMS turned out the way it was always going to, it was entirely undeserved hype, a company like Nintendo has earned the right to have people excited for it. So far I'm not seeing anyone expecting this to be any more than it has the possibility to be, NMS was expected to be more than it ever possibly could be.
Also knowing Nintendo if you don't want to pre-order this thing you're going to have to wait because there isn't going to be enough, when you start getting news of things being sold out the demand shoots up, which will encourage more devs to develop for it (Which was the Wii U's main killer), which means the Switch should do well.
As I said it's just leeway on the hype, you should always be smart about any purchase and know that any early purchase comes with the risk of it sucking shit, you should be prepared for that if you do dive in early. They don't appear to be repeating the mistakes of their past failings though so it's looking good so far for the life of it when you look at their history.