Performance is expensive. Building and validating a system around high end custom chips is expensive. They also will not make you units if you don't make serious volume commitments.
Building a very basic system with cheap, bad, off the shelf components is not expensive.
lol Nintendo are the only ones who get their games pirated, because they use antique hardware.
Let's ignore the fact that none of the major religions, or major sects of major religions, is internally consistent enough that it would be possible for a rational take on what their god's opinion is on anything modern using any kind of logic. Let's ignore that none of the sects agree with each other and that every one of them arbitrarily picks and chooses from their book and random external writings to determine "what god thinks".
It doesn't matter how many people are religious. It's still spam not actually relevant to piracy in any way.
Yes, designing the chips is obscenely expensive. Microsoft and Sony aren't using off the shelf $5 SoCs. They're partnering with AMD, using AMD's IP, to make custom designs specifically tailored to their design goals. The fact that you think you can talk about R&D costs without understanding this basic reality is hilarious. Validating high performance custom SoC designs takes a tremendous amount of very limited capacity of small batch test manufacturing ability to get to an end product.
I promise you Sony spent more developing their triggers than Nintendo did on the joycon. That actually is new tech. Putting IR and nfc sensors that already exist onto a controller isn't that expensive. Developing new tech is where costs come from. Sony isn't spending a couple hundred million. They're spending billions, every year.
Even after kicking their investment up for a switch 2 that can't use an off the shelf chip because there isn't one, they're still spending less than half of what Sony does.