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OP is definitely overextrapolating, but he's not entirely wrong. Gens I-IV were based on places that the game's developers would've been familiar with since childhood, allowing their regions' designs to come from their own internalized memories and experiences instead of a few months of outside research. Kanto's aesthetics and environments were chosen not to transport players to a new, exciting locale with 'exotic' flavoring, but to establish a baseline familiarity on which the novel aspects of the Pokémon world could develop, while the explicit goal of a region like Kalos was to create an unambiguous 'PokéFrance' (Unova's an odd middle ground here—although it would mark the beginning of regions stationed outside the developers' own culture, the prominent inclusion of several non-American cultures and original concepts like Lacunosa Town hampers the design's purity).
It's also worth noting that, with the sole exception of Alola, the size of each region's inspiration has been growing ever since Gen IV—Great Britain alone is large enough to fit almost three Hokkaidos (and Hokkaido itself is twice the size of any prior region), giving developers less room to incorporate the minutiae of the area. If anything, today's regions are closer in spirit to the GSC beta map than anything from the sprite era.
