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I wouldn't say SWSH has no merits whatsoever, but the game is just deeply flawed on conceptual level. The whole concept of the Wild Area is flawed. It looks and feels like a simple tech demo, there's nothing there besides Pokemon walking around in circles for you to catch and spots for raid battles. You basically get the full experience within 5 minutes. To make matters worse, the regular routes and towns have the most basic, linear, hallway-like level design, a problem that Pokemon had had for a few years, but was now worse than ever. It was all clearly an afterthought because the player was expected to want to stay in the Wild Area for most of their play time. Not to mention all the plot railroading.
And then there's the sheer easiness. I know difficulty in Pokemon is a meme, but SWSH's design is patently ridiculous. You're encouraged to goof around in the Wild Area as much as you like as soon as you get there, but even just few minutes of catching and battling will leave you grossly overleveled for your next plot section, not to mention all the TRs and other ways you can buff your Pokemon. You have to actively try so hard to ignore so much if you don't want to steamroll the game.
A wide, open sandbox shoehorned smack dab in the middle of a heavily linear RPG just doesn't work. It was clearly the product of Game Freak's ineptitude and unfamiliarity with designing a large, modern game world. It's pretty obvious too, since they immediately dropped this system (permanently, I hope) in favor of a full sandbox game (PLA) and a full open world (SV).
And that's not getting into all the subjective things like the silliness of Dynamax and the awful, awful plot.
I think SWSH will go down as one of the most pointless games in the series, an outdated, confused mishmash of half-baked ideas. There's no reason to ever go back to it, anything it did other Pokemon games did better.
