>>39661124>>39659586It literally isn't data storage, though. It's mostly how having this many pokemon makes it much, much harder to add new things and change older stuff.
For example, while we now do have walking and running animations, what if they ever want to make a minigame where the pokemon have to jump? Or kick a ball? Well, that's 1k new animations for something most players will play for maybe five minutes. Unless you start restricting what mon are eligible, which isn't really an elegant solution.
Heck, we've seen this in for example amie/refresh, where not all pokemon have sleeping or "high-five" animations. Having this many pokemon makes even trivial things such as adding a new move or changing a TM much, much more time consuming, and actual changes to anything or new features involving pokemon ever-increasingly more impossible.
Honestly, even if the turning point was delayed yet another couple of gens, it'd have arrived some day in the future. People have been aware of this and speculating ever since at least gen4, where it seemed they had exhausted all of the ideas they could've had in terms of pokemon designs/lore, not to mention there already being 400+ by that point.
At one point, you have to do something. Either you stop making new ones or you remove old ones, and whether you like it or not, GF chose for the latter, since they realize the designs are what reels in the masses, and expanding/modifying the lineup keeps things fresh.
Imo, they could've taken a middle path, by allowing the old mon to be transferred but not allowing them to learn any TMs and otherwise being unable to make use of anything new (like dynamax, due to stats, balancing and overall not having tested how well it looks/performs with these mon) or participate in competitive. Though I'm unsure how I'd feel about that.
