>>58698106Honestly they don't even need to snitch like that. If a criminal organization is in search of resources and power, they certainly would research what other groups were up to. Team Rocket in particular hijacked a whole city and later a media building, that had to make the news (demonstrably literally in the latter case). A local mafia being able to do that much is very enticing - how were they backed, or what were they after? A little digging on their activities and you would come across Lavender Town and Mr. Fuji, and a quick background search reveals some interesting facts about this man, so they'd just need to search over his old laboratory... ... oh. Oh right.the Cinnabar volcano's eruption destroyed all evidence and a valuable amount of documentation that might have been at the modern lab, didn't it? They would need to have some further hints to overcome this dead end, it's nor worth it to further research the work and connections of a random scientist, famous as he might be (famous enough to become the founder of Kanto's biggest research center, the same center that pioneered the technique of fossil resurrection).
Another potential source is random people. The wild pokémon there might be somewhat strong but you can just run for them. Whatever was in there was valuable enough for several looters and a few scientists to search the place all at once long after its destruction. That one of them found the journals, recognized their value and took them in the two years before the eruption was extremely likely. So maybe Team Flare didn't even need to learn about TR or Mr. Fuji.
>>58698330I'm a doylist too, but it IS a fact that Giovanni had a mewtwo in that game and there were other ways to make him stronger. I'm of the belief that initially they didn't intend Team Rocket to be involved with mewtwo when writing R/G, but the pieces line up so nicely that Giovanni being after mewtwo became internal canon by gen 7.