The jump from NES to SNES made the originals feel instantly outdated. Instead of cheap ports, Nintendo treated its own recent history like it was worth modernizing, preserving, and re-presenting as a premium current-gen experience. That basically introduced the idea that old games could come back not just as nostalgia, but as something legitimately improved without losing what made them great.
We probably won’t see something like that again at that scale because the conditions don’t exist anymore. Today, companies can just re-release originals through emulation instantly and cheaply, and there’s actually more value in preserving them exactly as they were. Rebuilding multiple full games from scratch for a single package would be wildly expensive now, and expectations are higher, people would compare each remake to standalone modern releases. Back then it was a forward-looking upgrade, now it would be seen as an overreach or split into separate $40 remakes.