Screw it, I'm feeling more generious towards modern Smash for once.
I don't get the "Smash comes out too early in a generation" criticism. For Melee specifically? Yeah, that game is holdover heaven and its follow-up was almost 7 years away, a small few trophies for the GCN but mostly an NES-SNES-N64 crossover following after another crossover with the exact same scope. But Brawl? That game remained quite up-to-date to the franchises represented for the rest of the generation in terms of visual designs and content (as would the Smash series going forwards for all series with one hilariously tiny exception I'll discuss later). Mario Galaxy and significant rep for generic Wii games are glaring outliers, but stuff like Skyward Sword; Xenoblade; Epic Yarn; and DKCTF would've came out at the same time as a late-stage Brawl, and early-DS/late-GBA content is quite plentiful. 3DS is arguably more centered on 3DS games than the late-stage 64 is on N64 games, with the only stages you could possibly argue as being completely unrelated to the 3DS at the end of its lifespan (no games in the series with a location like it on DS or 3DS, no older games with it emulatable on VC/Ambassador) being Corneria and Umbra (small outlier in PictoChat, which wasn't accessible on 3DS, but it was on DS and the stage was supposedly intended to be based on Swapnote before the scandal so I'll allow it), and most of its DS stages are from later releases. Wii U has a decent split between modern games and non-modern games (12 out of 31 original stages are from 3DS or Wii U games). 3DS and Wii U share a strange lack of Inkling, but the Wii U/3DS was otherwise an infamous era of "sticking to basics" where very few new characters were introduced, so getting 4 modern newcomers (5 if you count Palutena, who is only really a character because of Uprising) is surprising, and all of the 1P newcomers had some kind of modern presence on 3DS, Wii U, late-stage Wii, or late-stage DS, with the one exception being Duck Hunt, a character who is more iconic 40 years later without Smash than a clean-cut half of the original 8 (everyone who isn't a Mario character, Link, or Pikachu
you could make an argument for kirby or jigglypuff, but samus? fox? absolutely not.) were at their peak. Finally we get to Ultimate where they've fully embraced the promotional vehicle status through DLC - all of Nintendo's major Switch releases are repped somehow, and a lot of the weird low-key stuff too, with some of it being base game. All the new base stages sans 1 are either from Switch games or Nintendo's biggest IP in two decades. Nintendo's still squeezing juice out of Martinet's archival recordings when applicable, so the only major change to Nintendo character branding that could've influenced Ultimate if it came out later but didn't is uh... Dedede's smaller pupils. That's literally it. Start and end. Dedede's smaller pupils.
And the only major Nintendo character introduction to miss the boat as a spirit... Horace the Horse.
Everything else missed would, looking at prescedent, not have been reflected in Smash at all no matter when (personality and ability changes, characters being phased out of their franchises, franchises in general being phased out - Smash doesn't do either reworks or cuts much). This criticism tends to feel more to me like "Get your filthy BOOMER CONTENT out of my precious IP showcase game!" as if
your games aren't going to be boomer games in 20 years.
