This has nothing to do with covid, it was slowly happening even before covid was a thing.
Directs are red ocean, they have a news menu on their console that they use to slap advertising in your face and call it "news"; you see it every time you turn on your console, or if you put it in stand by as well. They're slowly abandoning the Direct formula, that's it.
See what they did with Paper Mario and Pikmin, that's the future. The game gets announced, it will release in a month or so, in that month they will push it on TV and other media with advertising, and when the sales boost expires, they move to the next game. When Pikmin 3 will die off, a new "big" Nintendo game will be announced and released in a short time. The only exceptions will probably be the AAA titles, like Breath of the Wild 2 and (maybe) Metroid Prime 4, they may get some dedicated directs like Pokèmon, Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing (and some others) did in the past. They will focus on one game at time and push it to death for a month or so; that's what they are doing since a while, they're just making it more evident now.
Smash is not the "game of the month" anymore, at this point I think that any Smash news can be shadowdropped at any time... again, I think it will be mid-september, I was convinced that the next character was going to be teased or released around september since when the ARMS character was not being revealed and it was clear that they were dragging the reveal on purpose. Covid is just a coincidence.
The second fighter pass is a 2021 thing, the characters revealed this year are just there to keep the fans interested. 2021 will get reveals with a similar pace as pass 1.
Another thing that I said time ago and that I still think it's very likely to happen, is that probably they will slowly connect the end of the DLC era of Ultimate, with the announcement of a new console and a new Smash game. This way the speculation cycle will never end and they can continue forever with their precious marketing based on hyping the characters. Nobody will ever feel like their favorite was left out, everyone will hope in the next reveal for another chance; deconfirmeds of Ultimate will be considered again, and fan favorites left out will be the next boxart newcomers (such as Waluigi).