“Historically, we’ve been very agnostic, right? We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily. We also have a platform that was just launched. We’re barely just over a year into NS2. It’s got both digital and physical – that capability. There’s no plans to ditch physical. We know how much the fans like it as well, so our position has been to be agnostic.”
It’s not really surprising that built-in drives are faster than external ones. There’s a reason the PS5 installs physical games in the internal SSD. Obviously, switch cartridges are much faster than Blu-rays, but they are still constrained.
It’s just unfortunate that you can’t install physical games onto the internal SSD on the switch. Maybe developers could use a trick of a patch that installs performance-critical parts on internal storage?