>>26977762To be honest, it's been like this for a while now.
Kanto, in the beginning, was very much intended to fit in to our real world. It was literally just based on IRL Kanto in Japan, and there was tonnes of references to other places in the world, such as America.
Hoenn was where things really started to get weird, and they even rotated the island so that it'd have to be facing East if Hoenn was to match perfectly with the IRL counterpart.
The Gen 4, they started to avoid making any references to the real world(and no, the GTS Globe seriously does not count)
HG/SS showed us in the map that Sinnoh is directly north of Johto, again proving that the regions can not match up to their IRL geographical counterparts.
Then Gen 5 showed up, with an American-inspired patchwork Region shaped like NYC, which effectively put a bullet into the idea that it all matches up to our real-world Geography.
OR/AS has Serebii's map in the game as an Easter Egg. Now I DO NOT believe this makes Serebii's map Canon, as it doesn't match up with the Geography of the games. But it DOES tell us that Game Freak chose against just putting a generic IRL map instead.
And then lastly, as you say, Alola is missing half of Hawaii's islands.
So yeah, I think the franchise slowly drifted further and further away of the Pokémon world being our own real world, and now only uses the real world as inspiration, not direct/specific geography choices.
I doubt they'll ever give us a proper canon map though. And no, a generic globe in your bedroom shouldn't be used as proof either, especially when it's literally in the game where half the IRL counterpart is missing, if that makes sense.
