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So I decided to go back and play SwSh again. I played Sword for an hour or so when I realized I wanted a Ponyta so I swapped my Sword save to Shield. Everything worked fine, the cutscene of all the gym leaders showed Allister and Melony and I'm getting Shield specific random encounters.
However the 4th gym is the Fighting gym. I beat Bea and get the Ghost badge. I'm guessing both gyms are programmed into both games and there's some flag in the save file for which to fight. Sorry for blogposting, just sharing on the off chance there's a fix. I would prefer to fight the MILF after all.
