But if you look over the whole sweep of ST history, it's clear that cloaking devices have been a "new" technology many times. The BoT cloak could be detected by motion sensors, but then the "Enterprise Incident" cloak was a new breakthrough that defeated that weakness. Starfleet obtained that cloak through espionage, and presumably penetrated it, but then the Klingons developed a cloak that confounded sensors but could still be detected by visual distortion (as seen in ST III). Then they fixed that problem and developed a cloak that a ship could fire through, but Spock was able to confound that cloak by detecting the gaseous exhaust of the engines. So that cloak presumably was busted as well. Yet 75 years later in TNG, the Romulans and Klingons both have nearly perfect cloaks that Starfleet can't detect, except eventually Starfleet figures out they can be partially detected by neutrino emissions. And they can't be fired through. And so on.
So it's already implicit in canon that there's a constant arms race between stealth and detection, that there have been multiple times in history when one cloaking technology is penetrated and rendered obsolete until another new kind of cloaking device is later invented. Thus, it's no problem at all to incorporate the 22nd-century Suliban and Romulan cloaks into that sequence. It's no more of a contradiction than TNG showing that Klingons can't fire through cloaks in the 2360s even though they could in the 2290s. You just conclude they're different types of cloak.
It was a first contact as far as they knew. Even fictional characters aren't omniscient. It's no contradiction if they didn't know there was a prior contact. And the ENT episode made sure that the name "Ferengi" was never mentioned. The species may not even have called itself that at the time; they may have had a different dominant language.
And it's not like there isn't precedent. "Q Who" was presented as the first contact with the Borg, but Voyager contradicted that with Seven of Nine's backstory.
There is real-life precedent, as well. For centuries, we thought Christopher Columbus' voyage in 1492 was the first contact between Eurasia and the Americas. But we now know that the Norse established the Vinland colony in North America in the year 1000. There's some linguistic evidence that the Zuni Indians of California may have had contact with the Japanese in medieval times. And the Inuit have been crossing the frozen Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska for thousands of years. So what's believed to be a "first contact" is sometimes preceded by several other "first contacts" that get forgotten or aren't widely known. It's just the first contact that history definitively records. And history is intrinsically imperfect.
Indeed, as a student of history, I quite like the fact that ENT contradicted some of the things we thought we knew about Trek history. Because that's realistic. If we could go back in time and witness the 18th or 19th century firsthand, we'd find a ton of "continuity errors" between the real thing and the version recorded by history. History isn't the actual past, it's just an account of the past, subject to bias and distortion and incomplete knowledge. If ENT's version of the 22nd century had been exactly what we expected it to be, that would've been rubbish.
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