stalking, sounds about right
Read like a boring and basic PI background report to me.
Finances, living arrangements, personal relationships, skills, employment, routine, deviations from routine...
Less ninja and more some local ex policeman got paid £50 an hour to sit in their car with a camera and notepad, and scan through public records and social media.
Whether it was warranted or not is a matter for debate. Active threat as far as Nintendo was concerned... maybe.
Re: Imagine hiring the hackers to work for you.
As mentioned earlier schools don't necessary crank out the hackers, indeed most education is all about stifling the kind of mindset that really works here.
Though there are longer forms of this
Bit of a puff piece for their activities but does cover a lot.
Re: Nintendo browsing here.
Nintendo likely have two main interests in following here
1) Occasionally some of the hackery news gets released and collated here. Some of the hackers doing it also maintain generally active accounts which can also be useful.
If they care about cheats (there was that pokemon wifi peeking program*) and ROM hacks (debatable) then might have something more.
2) While hackers are scary when a person I know to have minimal technical abilities (mainly because I get tapped to do their IT) wanders up to me and mentions a little device they got for their kid's DS that they copied a bunch of games onto so they don't have to buy any new games all with zero prompting from me (the only people I have properly spoken to about flash carts in real life were other members of the site when we met up to go to that Switch launch event, and that was maybe three sentences at best while we were waiting to go in) then you know that represents a percentage of their bottom line at some level, or a least something to curb.
The average person following this thread probably pays little attention to the guide followers other than when they breach containment from the noob paradise threads but Nintendo surely do.
*Nintendo/gamefreak had seemingly not made it past page 2 of the big book of security and broadcast pokemon selections in plaintext while the other player could still select theirs. One little program to basically act as a glorified packet filter later (and hundreds, which itself is dozens of times what anything else ever got, of reports on filetrip from concerned/no fun pokefiends about how the program was "illegal") and yeah.