Does anyone else miss HMs? I feel like the greatest flaw of the modern games is how they completely gutted any sort of challenge in traversing the overworld. In older games, Pokemon was about going on an adventure with your Pokemon. Along the way you would have to solve some puzzles, some of which involved HMs. But ever since gen 5, the overworld has been streamlined and HMs have been given less importance. Now we're at a point where routes and caves are just linear paths with a few trainers scatter around. HMs acted as a way to naturally gate the progression of the player, it's an effective technique that has been widely used in the Zelda and Metroid series. It also allows the overworld to be much more interconnected and allows you to open up shortcuts when you acquire a new ability.

That's not to say HMs were perfect, they had some major flaws:
1. They take up a move slot and can't be unlearned easily (arguably a non-issue now that gen 8 lets you freely withdraw/deposit Pokemon from your PC)
2. A lot of them were pretty weak, Surf, Fly and Strength were the only ones good ones
3. A lot of them had the same type, e.g. 3 water HMs and 3 normal HMs

I feel like a better solution would be to either make HMs usable as field techniques without using a move slot (so you can surf as long as you have any water type in your team) or they can just give you items that allow you to traverse new areas (e.g. Go-Goggles that let you access the desert in RSE, the bike upgrade that lets you cross water in SS, etc.) Pokeride was another alternative, however those almost all had very specific use cases or they just replaced old key items like the bike or itemfinder. There were very rarely used for puzzle solving.