>>49364830That had to be the case, since they've been called Pocket monsters throughout history, long before the technology to digitize and store them as data was invented. For all the strange contradictions that come about if you think too hard about every Pokemon naturally being able to shrink, far more inconsistencies in the lore arise if we assume only the modern method exists, which was pioneered like 20 or so years ago in-universe or I think even less than that
