spitfire

I'm not saying it was the reason. I believe it was one of the things that survived relatively unscathed;)

Ok, then don't. Nobody's forcing you to.

I believe I had Eneloop Pro's (2500mAh?) in there and while the Elite would last 40h the Xbox One worked for 20-30h at most. When Elite's LED turned orange it still had enough juice for a few hours, so I could complete my gaming session easily, can't say that about the other one which was really annoying

I prefer keeping mine in a carrying bag instead of leaving it in the dock to be constantly charging and collecting dust

There are also performance implications (a Zigbee coordinator can easily handle 100 devices, while many routers would struggle with that amount of clients), power saving (especially for battery powered sensors) - some Zigbee sensors can last years on a single coin cell battery.

Heavy usage and maybe more importantly dust/dirt.

Like the Logitech one used in that submarine? ;)

I've used both Xbox One controller (powered by AA rechargeable batteries), and Xbox Elite Series 2 (built in rechargeable battery). The battery life on the first one was really poor compared to the Elite 2. Considering the fact I did not have to charge the Elite often, I'd guess the battery might outlive the rest of the controller, and if not you could still probably find a replacement on AliExpress. Convenience of a battery that you have to charge less often than once a week is really much higher than using AA batteries.

Same would and did happen on Switch 1 though

Which may be different issues, and no one mentioned the environment they were in.

There is one (mentioned in https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/nintendo/nintendo-is-restricting-the-switch-2s-usb-c-port-most-third-party-docks-and-accessories-wont-work-thanks-to-proprietary-protocols). I've seen people confirm it's working. I'm waiting for mine to get delivered from AliExpress. Supposedly it has no holes where the console has air intakes, I'm planning to try connecting it using USB-C extension cable.