A I understand it, the PS3, Xbox 360, and PS4 have been broken by hackers. The Xbox opened its platform to unsigned code removing a big incentive for hackers to break the system. I’m expecting the PS5 to be hacked first.
The PS4 was hacked intermittently, which is what I meant by uphill struggle. The exploits are the "bottom up" variety starting in usermode and escalating up to patching the kernel, which can be fixed by firmware updates, so if you're not sitting on an old firmware you're out of luck. They've also never managed to escalate to the root of trust, which means you can't exploit vulnerable firmware X and then update to a pre-rooted non-vulnerable firmware Y like you could on the PS3 - you're stuck on firmware X and will eventually get locked out of newer game releases that need Y or newer.
Without the bootloader exploit the Switch would have been a similar story - firmwares up to 4.10 were hacked in much the same way the PS4 was hacked, but that has very limited usefulness. I don't think you could have decrypted Tears of the Kingdom using such an old firmware.
