I've found that it's almost useless to compare sales of one video game system to an older one, such as what is done here, because the game market is always growing. It's like comparing nominal consumer product prices over time, without taking inflation into account. In other words, we need some kind of "video game sales inflation adjustor" to account for the changing times.

For example, I remember reading that something crazy like 40% of US households had an NES. Yet it "only" sold 34 million units in America in its entire lifetime, which would be considered a failure by today's sales metrics. By that standard, the Wii's sales numbers-- which are even nominally larger than Switch's-- are especially impressive considering that it came out thirteen years ago.