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The only reason ??? existed in the first place was because we had 15 types originally and in programming you can't have bits by themselves you get the full byte so multiples of 8 work best. In the case of types if you look at the file structure for gen 1 you can see they gave each pokemon 2 bytes used for bitflags to represent its type so there'd be a single bit leftover and to prevent errors or potentially crashes you'd have to check for and handle cases where that bit was somehow turned on anyways so you might as well do something with it. Still agree it should be brought back though since it existed for 4 gens, gen 7 was supposed to be the big 20th anniversary "it all comes together" celebration and introduced the perfect pokemon to use it, and now not only are types saved per species instead of per pokemon but we've got good enough hardware that a few wasted bits here and there doesn't matter.
