>>54322811I don't hate the game or the people who play it, but I will always be resentful that it was probably the final straw that destroyed the main series.
The following is just cynical headcanon, but I think I'm not too far off:
Masuda had been of the opinion that they shouldn't bother putting in a bunch of content in the main games since 2014 at the latest and Ishihara thought the Switch wouldn't sell because of smartphones.
GO doing so well proved them right, at least in their own heads. GO launched in 2016, SM came out the same year and for an initial pair, it was pretty decent. Then, in 2017, we get the laziest revised versions yet, followed by the first switch titles in 2018 being an attempt to draw in the GO audience by pandering to them, all the while GO got bigger and made more money.
GF had already tried to split off from pokemon once by putting their primary team on Tembo, which launched a year prior to GO didn't do too well. They tried again during swsh's development with LTH and failed again, while GO continued to succeed.
GF already don't want to work on pokemon, their attempts to create anything else to be known for have failed, they get upstaged in popularity by a freemium game for phones, a platform that their head honcho had already been using as an excuse to cut corners for years and then they see it get even bigger off the back of work they did over a decade ago.
Now, they're not only unhappy about working on pokemon, but also less willing to let someone else have it because they risk getting upstaged. They'll bitterly put out unfinished, non-functioning games until the franchise dies, it's because they want to be the ones to kill it and want no one else to have it.
