In the bit era this made more sense, but now generations are arbitrary.
The Bit era ended in 2000 what are you talking about?
LOL, what?
Nearly all generations of home consoles were defined exactly in this manner, with Nintendo just being behind the curve power-wise the last few.
Also. Switch could run Flight Sim and R&C, they would just be severely downgraded. What are you even saying here?
What's funny about Mario 64 as a showcase game is that on a technical level in was incredibly basic other than the polygon resolution, and was made up of flat shaded simple polygons, the exact type of game the Jaguar was mocked for, forcing them to make Devs try to add features the console couldn't handle to their 3D games. The sucking up by the press was embarrassing at the time. Any time there were other big 3D games next to Mario 64 most of the audience that weren't the press or fans would always huddle more around those games for the graphics.
But yes they were still leaps above what was previous, since the Fairchild each console generation was defined by the power it showed, and that continued until today. Only thing about Generations is earlier ones have had the consoles switched around as to what qualifies as what, but regardless power was the game.
Fairchild solitaire with accurate card images was favorably compared to Atari combat until it got better games. Where they showed off Asteroids and other fun games.
Mattel added more depth and animation to games and more colors.
Coleco Added more of everything and focused on big sprites and expansions and all the colors and objects on screen.
7800 added parallax, rotation, and mass number of resizable sprites, while NES introduced higher color count, and SMS showed off big colorful sprites.
Genesis introduced speed and more detailed graphics, SNES had mode 7 to give the illusion of 3D and allowed devs to experiment adding to cartridges.
3DO introduced the 3D that would become standard, Sony and Sega induced 3D games with better effects and texture mapping and higher frame rates, Dreamcast was literally the arcade machine, PS2 had the emotion engine nonsense, Gamecube had flipper, Xbox had the shaders, lighting, and the custom Pentium and could display in HD.
360 came out hard with HD and new graphical breakthrough with Gears of War, while PS3 introduced high quality video playback disguised as cutscenes without compression.
Xbox One introduce Full HD with several enemies on screen, while PS4 introduced more consistent 1080P with marginally more stable frame rates, with Ryse and Killzone Shadow fall being the showcase games.
Now we have MS Flight Simulator, Forza Horizon 5, Ratchet and Clank, and soon, Starfield, Forza reboot, GoW Rag.
Nothing has changed.