Unpopular? I didn't
want the Grinch Leak to be real.
And that's admittedly part of why I didn't believe it - it was sort of a weird case of confirmation bias. Yeah, there were objective details here or there that were suspicious, but my gut feeling against it was that I didn't like the scenario.
Okay, partly it was a purely selfish 'a bloobloobloo my favourite characters didn't get in
' and I'm prepared to admit that. But a large part of it was also that the leak, if real, would have been really ... well ... boring.
I have nothing against any of the Grinch leak characters individually and it would be cool to see them all eventually be playable. A bike-based fighter like Mach Rider could be really fun. Rhythm Heaven should have more than just spirits and music. And the Sonic series could really do with a second fighter by now.
But collectively, the whole thing came off as a ****ing checklist. You had your fan favourites (Geno, Banjo, Isaac) which seemed to align with the inclusion of Ridley and K Rool. You had Ken and Shadow, the two echo 'locks'. Even Chorus Kids and Mach Rider, the two weirder inclusions, had fan logic behind them (Gematsu and past Sakurai comments respectively). The only weird thing about it was no Pokemon, but again that came off as confirmation bias: many fans didn't want Incineroar and really wanted to prove Vergeben wrong.
If the Grinch leak was real, then we'd have been massively spoiled on the game and the last direct would have been kind of dull: just a series of 'hey look, it's this character now!' trailers with no surprises. It would have also been kind of depressing that Sakurai's best plans to prevent leaks had been undone yet again.