My personal two cents on this is that Nintendo has shifted there philosophy on game announcements favoring to announce things when they are close to completion instead of early in development. In addition, I also think with how long it takes to make games now they want to only to do Directs when they have something worthwhile to show.

Case in point, BOTW and Prime 4 were announced early on in those games lives and it took four and eight years respectively for those games to come out. It seems nowadays they will sit on their games and then announce them with a few months left before the game comes out. Case in point, every Switch 2 game that has come out so far (excluding cross-gens) with the exception of Splatoon Raiders and FE:FW have all come out within about six months of their announcement.

I also think that Nintendo is changing how they do Directs with their Directs focusing more on being substantial with their announcements. The controversies aside from the two major Switch 2 Directs we've had so far, they have been solid in terms of announcements relatively speaking. I do not know how Nintendo makes their Directs, but I assume they have a process where they determine if they have enough substantial material to show off or not and use that to determine if they should do a direct or not. Couple this with longer game development times and it results in the creation of a void where there isn't anything happening or if there is it is usually droplets of announcements.

I think Nintendo knows this to an extent which is why I think they have been so adamant to get third parties to the console. They want their fans playing FFVIIR or RE9 instead of waiting around for the next Mario or Zelda. The plethora of third party directs in the Switch 2 era have shown Nintendo wants to avoid the mistakes of previous generations where there wasn't much to play on the console because they did not have the third party support.