>>55567200I never got this idea. It's really only the anime that "rebooted", barely at that. Pikachu losing to Snippy was just to show that Zekrom zapped its power, meanwhile Dawn returns and Ash still has all of his memories of previous adventures. Previous seasons also had him nerfed in some way at the beginning.
As for the game, the whole "knockoff" narrative is insanely overblown and almost every region has them as well. The only thing that actually points to this is the "new pokemon only" main campaign, which is barely anything since the postgame of the same game already reintroduced previous generation mons. No one calls Scarlet Violet a soft reboot when they went back to colors again and literally retired Ash altogether. No one called Alola a soft reboot when it completely changed the formatting of the games and anime in many ways.