>>49151564They were always supposed to be yes (Green's LGPE redesign even uses Leaf's updated hair and teal dress coloration, I mean come the fuck on)
They're both explicitly modern incarnations of the original Kanto girl Sugimori designed.
But for some inexplicable reason, Sugimori (or more likely TPCi marketing) started treating them completely differently characters just a year after LGPE came out.
The trading cards that use the LGPE design, as well as Evolutions still call her green. But the merch and Masters appearances using the FRLG design started calling her Leaf.
Until recently, Leaf was only a fan term mostly pushed by Bulbapedo because of placeholder names in the game data (the same placeholder data that would call Ethan = Heart, and Red = Fire so it completely fails to match up accurately to actual naming conventions TPCi and Game Freak used)
So basically, Bulbapedo's autism caused a name split that essentially split the character into two separate beings in the canon. To this day I literally wonder if some TCPi intern just took the name Bulbapedo used for the FRLG design in upcoming media, because I absolutely refuse to believe that the name/character split came from the top.
