You say that as if these games have ever had any friction or challenge to begin with.Idk, I think a lot of times when people talk about "QoL," they're talking about the removal of any and all friction whatsoever, which I don't think is always a good design goal.
They never did. All pokemon games have always been dumb easy since these games at core were designed to be played and beatable by school children and never featured difficulty options (with the one exception in gen 5 and we know how that went).
As someone who hangs around in the postgame a lot, I don't end up thinking of QoL as always increasing for later games. Removing infinite TMs is a dev intended example of a drop, but I'd also put Emerald pretty far above its peers because of it having an easy item duplication glitch.
I'm not sure if "this game has a gamebreaking glitch that makes it easier / more convenient" is supposed to be counted as a "positive" sir.
Also, context is important in understanding design decisions. They didn't remove "infinitely reusable TMs" because they felt like it. They did because SwSh and SV are designed as pseudo-liveservices which try to keep players engaged for longer, and having minor grinds is a key aspect of both live services and RPGs in general.
TMs are still virtually infinite, with the only difference you need to invest 5 mins of your time to get them (if even) instead of having them ready. While yes, obviously slightly less convenient, that came with pretty much every other QoL aimed at making the game more accessible to VGC to everyone, the addition of other items like Nature Mint, Ability Patches, Bottle Caps, etc, obtainable in basically same way of TMs (beat the shit out of raids).
Also (speaking of context), rather than "replace infinite TMs", they mixed what was TMs and Tutors. If you forgot, not everything was available via TM in gen 6, 7 and 8, a lot of things had to be either acquired via tutors (which required *battle facility grind*, much MUCH worse than stomping some raids with your lvl 100 legendary) or via TR which... were basically same as gen 9 TMs.
All in all, it's still a upgrade, of all the so called infinite TMs, large majority were trash you used once maybe in the story and never again, most of the actually good ones were either TRs in SwSh or tutor moves in USUM / ORAS, so honestly, nothing changed, you still need some level of grind to make endgame viable pokemon. Just in gen 9 it's infinitely easier.
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