The Atari cheated too; Pitfall II used a David Crane-designed DPC chip [0], Atari's SARA Superchip on a number of the later carts like Crystal Castles and Jr. Pac-Man, and the Starpath Supercharger's [1] games were undeniably bigger and better looking.
The VCS released in 1978, Pitfall II in 1984 which shows the idea of offloading processing and memory came a looong way in just 4 years between Pitfall II, Nintendo's MMC1 in stuff like Legend of Zelda (1986) and the MMC3 in SMB3 (1988). Crane's DPC wasn't officially patented until 1987, the video game gap between 1984-88 is still mind-boggling.
[0]: https://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/pitfall2/pitfall2....