For everyone going "lol steven's an anime character doe", they've been extremely deliberately avoiding showing ANY characters or even legendary Pokemon that already appeared in the Ashnime (aside from the nurses, which was always more of an easter egg that's still gameverse compliant), to a point where they turned Zygarde shiny just to clarify "no, this isn't Squishy from XYZ."
Odds are, since we're likely going to leave Horizons behind in time for Gen 10, they're starting to peel back that limitation because they'll just refresh to a new cast and focus on even more characters who hadn't yet appeared in the anime, of which there's a lot of in the releases between SWSH and LZA (especially LZA, which was basically hard denied any representation outside of its Mega Evolutions by the conscious decision to use 16 year old Emma for their LZA shilling and a complete lack of appearances from other LZA characters, which makes sense because there'd be a timeline discrepancy).
