I don’t know about recommended. Without a lot of mucking around, a noun’s always going to respond in one way at a time. Singular or plural. Proper-named or improper, etc. It’s easy to change something from singular to plural, or from one thing to something else, as a one off during the game. But that works beset when the change is expected to be permanent, or at least lasting longer than a move.
When I look at your example, I think ‘they’re hardly portable’ is fine, because what you presented to the player was CONSOLES, plural.
You could do something like make a single console and a plural console, and hide one in the room, but this is a level of implementation few would consider worthwhile for scenery. If the objects are important, then it might be worth it. When it’s not worth it, you can be introducing more complications for yourself that are as icky as the first one.
I do use code that allows an object to take both singular and plural pronouns at once. What do I mean? In your consoles case, I’d have made the consoles plural-named. Player types ‘GET CONSOLE’ and it says ‘THEY’RE HARDLY PORTABLE.’ Now what if the player next types ‘KICK IT’ (meaning the console). IT doesn’t match plural-named, so the command fails.
For objects like this, I set them to either singular or plural-named as works best with their printed names (consoles must obviously be plural), then use this adjective I created called ‘p-switchy’, meaning ‘plural-switchy’. Then they will respond to either IT or THEM. I have a demo over in this post
-Wade