I wonder why they settled

Because they were engaged in code theft, piracy and Nintendo had them dead to rights. Leaked chats and drive folders showed they were actively pirating games, paywalling questionable content and using the Switch SDK. Clean room emulation implementations are completely legal. Their methods and behavior were not.

Holy shit… it’s a large dot matrix plasma display. Haven’t seen one of those in ages.

https://hackaday.io/project/179986-plasma-display-mc6205

That project has pictures that show you how they looked/worked.