>>54362182I misread that, my bad. That said, there's still a different and far more sensical argument to be made here: Pokemania's popularity is actually less than modern-day Pokemon's popularity.
Pokemania was still confined to mostly nerd circles. While it may have made Pokemon a household name, the games of all Pokemania-era games(Gen 3 included for the sake of my anal insistence that it ended after the first week of the debut launch of RS) do not exceed those of either Switch generations. The Switch titles are therefore more popular than Pokemania-era Pokemon. This would then mean that the peak popularity had not been reached during Pokemania, and your argument is about 4 years out of date.
I'll have to exclude remasters like FRLG, and LGPE, mostly because LGPE add another 15 million to gen 1 and HGSS another 12 million to Gen 2 if I included them, and those numbers would actually invalidate my argument. 
