Didn't care? Consumers don't care about this. Like most EU laws, this is a solution in search of a problem. Nintendo, like every other tech company, did the research and found that people simply don't care about this stuff. Now we have more complicated devices and have to buy our own batteries for what, exactly? There is just very little benefit here.

This is like the Germans decommissioning their nuclear power plants, What have they gained by doing so? Dependency on the Russians?

I think consumers do care when they have to throw away a device or pay for a repair because the battery health has significantly degraded. This is really similar to the argument against having a standardized charging port or requiring usb-c charge ports for cellphones.