Why the hell does Pokemon still have all this text during battles? It's completely unnecessary by this point and does nothing but kill the pacing of battles.

Like the whole origin of having text in battles to describe what's happening was back when graphics were simple enough that it would hard to visually show everything that's going on and make it clear to the player. It was especially used games with a first-person type view during battles, which was the norm until the SNES era. It made sense when the original Red/Green used it because the graphics were short and simple enough that text description help you know what's going on.

But there's a reason why if you look at almost any other game that uses this style you'll find that most attack animation are short and snappy, and the text usually appears on the instantly, with no need to wait for the text box to appear or for the text to scroll across the screen. This keeps the battles going at at a decent pace, without having to constantly stop to let the text scroll, and lets you mash through things if you're fighting some trash mob that you know you don't really need to pay attention too. Meanwhile, most JRPG's started in the 90's to follow what Final Fantasy and some others started, where they get rid of the text description entirely and convey everything through things like move animations, damage numbers and words like "miss" popping up on the screen, and what moves are being used being shown by a box on top of the screen while the animation plays. This also keeps things fairly quick and snappy, while letting you have some more complicated animations and camera work. Even many of the text using games take stuff from this, like damage numbers, and at least SMT also has things like "WEAK" or "IMMUNE" or whatever pop up to quickly show elemental properties.