NES development is alive and well in the Romhacking community, and although I don't know of any detailed commercial project documentation of the sort you asked

NES development is alive and well in the Romhacking community, and although I don't know of any detailed commercial project documentation of the sort you asked about, there are tons of guides out there for NES development in general. It's pretty intense. You don't even have proper sprites. they had to work with 8x8 pixel tiles and piece them together to create images. There were also pretty severe pallet limitations. All in all it's very interesting.