Nintendo did pull an Infinite Warfare. It was called Metroid Prime: Federation Force.
But to be fair, not only is it unlikely we ever hear from that sub-sub-brand again, or revisit its art style, but the next time they had a Metroid to reveal, they learned to offset the negativity of focusing on the 3DS by also revealing MP4, thereby actually giving the 3DS game a chance to find success instead of finding itself in the line of fire from an already agitated fanbase. And it's funny and ironic because Nintendo doesn't like revealing games as early as they did MP4 for the exact reason of what happened to that game, but the point still stands that they learned from the backlash. Though obv it wasn't to the scale of CoD.
I don't think a Smash reveal will ever receive reception as unilaterally negative as that. And even if it did, unless it actually translated into majorly deviating from their sales' forecast, I think the most they would do is alter how they announced the character in the future. Because there were options they could've taken to mitigate the negative response from Byleth in the way they revealed the character, which was, I think we can all agree, inadvisable. Though it seems like that wasn't even their initial plan to reveal them that way.
If, for instance their original intention was to reveal them at the game awards, as they had done the year previous and the following year, I think they actually chose the lesser of two evils delaying them into January. That's not the crowd that wants to see another FE character.
