>>51543454Not everyone returned to work at OLM after the covid lockdown ended. Take this with a grain of salt, though, as I don't recall if this was confirmed officially.
There was a magazine interview where it came out that the higher-ups wanted Koharu to play a bigger role in the anime, resulting in a directional change for both her character and the anime itself.
Key staff members keep getting shuffled around, like when Jun Owada replaced Maki Kodaira and when Daiki Tomiyasu stepped down (or was demoted).
Goh's story arc has been reworked at least two (if not more) times and stuff that was supposed to happen sooner, like Gary's return, got pushed back, which is a shame because we lost some additional Gary/Goh build-up and battles.
The M8 was (probably) going to be shorter due to them only planning on animating Ash's battles.
I'm sure there's other stuff too, some of which may have come out that I don't remember or other stuff that hasn't (and may never) been revealed, but yeah, there's a reason for all these recaps and a drop in the animation quality. If you watch the episodes made before covid, the animation was more fluid than what we've generally gotten after the covid break.