I mean, people may disagree with these moves by Nintendo and this position may be short sighted, maybe not. But regardless, it's Nintendo's intellectual property to do with as they please. They certainly don't owe fans or customers anything.
Intellectual property shouldn't even exist in the first place, let alone be used to extort $50k from fans who are basically advertising their game for free, making it popular and driving a lot of sales. They're the ones who owe Nintendo nothing, yet they remained loyal despite this mistreatment.
So for all other meanings IP does not exist indeed, and this is a misleading term. But instead on arguing on these details, it seems more productive to point that there is an already existing alternative that is better for everybody.