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I have to imagine that foreign media faced much harsher scrutiny than domestic media, especially in the wake of 9/11. You couldn't have any references to the word bomb in anime, everything got changed to blast. Even as late as 2010/2011, the Genki-dama, which had been localized as Spirit Bomb for over a decade, had its name changed to Spirit Blast in the daytime TV English dub of Dragon Ball Kai. This was nearly a decade after 9/11 and they STILL couldn't say bomb to children.
I think it becomes easy to compare what we had as kids to what was coming out a decade later. We heard bomb on TV all the time. Mr. Popo was black. Even if we couldn't totally remember the dialogue, we remembered the feeling of it hitting so much harder. So it created this impression that the more time passed, the stricter things became. But it was a combination of things. Dubs for children's properties from when we were kids were far from accurate, and they infamously would cut out entire episodes, this wasn't just a 4Kids thing. Localization was all over the place, entire musical scores were replaced, scenes were completely rewritten, and the dialogue played fast and loose. Later dubs (especially comparable ones like Dragon Ball Z/Kai) were likely more faithful on a line to line basis, the music was even retained, but lacked any of the punch the old dubs or even the Japanese version had, so you couldn't help but see them as watered down and worse. Pokémon as an anime would tone itself down considerably and get blander all on its own regardless of dub.
