What? The Cell was tough as hell to develop for...but it wasn't weak. That's why we got stuff like The Last of Us, Uncharted 2 and Killzone 2 during that gen
Devs can't perform miracles with a Series S.
Totally different situations.
They despise(d) both because both require extra work and a bit more than just good enough skill, and mostly also trust that the platform will grow in Cell's case, which it did, and the same now with S, since I would assume MS major growth potential lies ahead of us, starting just now with Starfield. It does not matter if one was relatively powerful, and heaven for the experimental coder, while a pain in the ass, and one is comparatively weak, but not really hard to develop for (maybe, not fundamentally harder as X, I guess). Both require "miracles" to make any game run on them, as do games in general. One because it is very different to usual systems and the other because you have to rethink/shrink your pipeline if you developed it for other system and were dumb enough to not plan it right away as a target platform.
Same way Cyberpunk did not run on last gen, because CD Project failed to actually do a proper port job and include it in engine planning. It looks good I guess, but so does Horizon which looks good on old and new plattforms.
The switch is weaker and devs don't bitch and moan all the time about it, because the platform is too huge to ignore. Smartphones while catching up are also not as powerful, flagship or average phones, and afaik some of the biggest (F2P) games got their ports for those too. It is just the hw they have to work with and once it's a target it just gets done, cause it has to, or they can chose not to.
Had devs their will cell would never have been that way, and it would have been a then more traditional PowerPC or even better already an x86 system, as close to a PC as possible.
As I said: something might have not gone ideal in the scalability, replace the better textures, set a lower resolution and be done with it is seemingly sometimes not enough, so it requires more work than initially planned, but nevertheless any dev and publisher worth a dime just has to either ignore it all together or work with what they got. Games have to scale down from 4090s too, which is a furhter jump already.
MS would be despised by those millions S owners if they ditched their S+X requirement just because of some overworked devs with narrow time constraints that want to get rid of the least sold platform. Any dillusions about them axing it, are insane.
Those devs whining would probably get no work done at all in N64 and Emotion engine days. Relying way too much on just x86 and maybe ARM and exploiting the vast feature sets only through the licensed engines and having no clue themselves anymore how to make things run properly.
