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It was hard when they were kids and back in the 90s there was no real culture of RPG gaming so the standards were different.
Fast forward 20 years and the average Pokemon consumer is in their 20s (official Nintendo data) and has 10s of similar games played under their belt. Yet the formula hasn't changed one bit to accomodate this fact (it's been made somewhat easier by Exp Share and whatnot) because it's still aimed for kids.
But kids don't play Pokemon (it's not cool, sorry grandpa), so you have the entire fanbase bitching about the game being too easy.
As to why people don't use the battle facilities / online competitive, the answer is simply because they are not autistic losers living in their mom's basement. Normal people beat the story mode and never touch that shit again.
Pokemon games will always be rated by their main campaign, with the exception of Emerald getting a bonus for the battle facilities, but only because they looked impressive to the eye and it was nice to run around the island, not because anyone actually used them.
I am sorry you think you can rate things without context and think this is the correct way to do things, but there is nothing more obtuse than anachronic revisionism. If the games seemed hard in the 90s, it's because they were for the context (mostly young people, no experience with games, and barely anyone had experience with RPGs).
It doesn't matter what a neckbeard who got into Pokemon late in his life and played them all 30 times thinks about them. It's no different to someone reading Descartes today and thinking "he said nothing special" because he's already been spoonfed Descartes-influenced thoughts since birth through other channels.
