Comment by UncleMeat

Yes, RBG retiring would not have switched the court.

But 6-3 is meaningfully different than 5-4. 6-3 means you can lose one from your coalition, enabling more extreme majority opinions. You can see this even in the very highest profile cases like Dobbs and Trump v US, where one of the conservatives didn't join the entire majority.

It also makes flipping the court enormously more difficult. 5-4 means that one conservative dying and an inopportune time and you flip it. 6-3 makes this statistically unlikely.

I very strongly suspect that we will see Alito and Thomas retire this year. Everybody knows how this goes now.