When I was a child, if I broke my console, I'd get my ass whupped. End of story.

The only caveat here is that your console was stationary, and probably much much larger, back in those days. The chance of you breaking it was considerably lower because you weren't going to be picking it up and moving it around constantly. Only really fucked people are going to get up and walk across the room to pick up and slam a console, which is why controllers were the thing we all learned that lesson on.

The Switch is more akin to handhelds of old, in that the majority of children are going to use it that way. Which means they are handing kids a pretty thin piece of expensive tech, which is a stupid idea from the design standpoint. Nintendo understood that back in the day. Its why the Gameboys and the DS lines were all pretty fucking sturdy and could probably do more damage to whatever they hit than themselves.