Was also burned by this when the WiFi module on my switch died. Had to send it away to be repaired, whereupon they swapped the main board (including all my saved games!). But the only way to backup before sending it away was ... Via the nonfunctional WiFi to the cloud.
I am in no way justifying or defending Nintendo decisions or actions here, I just wanna point out that if it was only the Wi-Fi card and not the entire NIC then you could have put it in the dock or a USB laptop dock, and connected it to ethernet.
I would still prefer to copies to an SD card, but you had options potentially
