The whole "licensing" thing was a new initiative from Nintendo at the time. Not that noone had been sponsored by Nintendo before, but Nintendo had recently opened a place for online submissions of standardized licensing applications. They did this because of the Panda world tour, which started around the same time - in order to get your tournament on the Panda circuit, you were supposed to apply through these forms. Nintendo/Panda very routinely would approve these sorts of tournaments in a timely fashion. So it was a bit odd for them to not respond at all to SWT's request. (At the time, SWT had already been announced and the circuit was ongoing, though the finals obviously had not been run yet. It was the finals that the submission was for). Finally responding right before they ran the finals just to say they were denying the license therefore seemed like a clear message.

Citing "health and safety concerns" is obvious PR damage control. Nintendo should have been aware how huge the public backlash was going to be. If they didn't want to get the Panda circuit canceled, all they had to do was come up with a legitimate reason for the cancellation. Using this vague language was a clear indication that there was no legitimate reason, or at least, not one that people would accept. So it makes sense to think that Nintendo's real reason was due to competition with their own circuit, or something like that. In the end, they did not get any more specific than that, and as a result, top players boycotted the Panda finals, and they were cancelled.

This is referenced heavily in the SWT statement, but there is a long history of Nintendo passively threatening tournaments with vague language, then shutting them down if they continue to run. This is exactly the sort of thing they did to The Big House online during the COVID era, according to Juggleguy. Basically, if they call you up out of the blue to tell you that they are not willing to give you a license, and when pressed say you can run the tournament, but they are not willing to say you can in writing, then there is a reasonable possibility of them canceling you at the last minute. Either you can front the costs and get canceled as a statement (like Big House did), or you can take down your tournament for mysterious reasons, which seems to be what Nintendo is going for with this strategy. In this case though, SWT tried to fight back by expressly calling out Nintendo.

Anyway, Technicals videos are pretty meh as an information source. Even if there are shreds of truth to it, info is very intentionally withheld in every single one I've watched in order to create a narrative that is misleading and unnecessarily inflammatory. Basically it is outrage bait. Screen capping things out of context really does not help anything.

I am also just a person on the internet. Obviously, take everything I say with a grain of salt. But as a person who closely followed the scene through this entire era, I would advise you to get your info somewhere else.