Yea.
Linear maps should only be present in games that have a good story to tell, and Pokémon is in its current state not one of them. The only game that was allowed to do this was BW/BW2 and they largely didn't have that same issue because of good route design. I cannot stress enough how badly I think of Pokémon's current map design philosophy. Not only map design, even the way that they copy-pasted some houses in the game makes the games lack character and breaks immersion. Also, the current philosophy doesn't award exploration. There's houses and big hotels in the game that offer nothing of value.
Removing Pokémon for no good reason will never be okay to me. This, together with removing certain moves, has only made the incredibly lazy animations more obvious. Pokémon X & Y were the only ones where I thought that it was okay because they 3D animated for the first time and did so for the entire roster, but ever since then I've side-eyed Pokémon games for the way they've started lacking in-battle, the most important aspect of the game.
Online play shouldn't be this lacking in 2020.
The handholding is something that brings it down another notch for me.
I don't view fondly of the current rivals either. I thought it was interesting how your main rival Hop has to find his own mantra back, but the game lacked a real rival because of it. Bebe ends up getting influenced by literally everyone and loses this energy that made him interesting in the first place, and the girl-rival is... Just there imo. It was a step up from SM though, at least. The worst part about the quite uninteresting and convoluted story is that you don't even get to solve most of the things yourself; Sonia and Leon get to. It's like telling a child that there's cookies at home but when they finally get home you don't even allow them to grab them.
And all of these issues exist within a 60 bucks triple A title. If we're gonna look at the DLC, then I'd have to view it as a 90 bucks game, and, well... I really don't want to do that.
GameFreak continues to get away with putting in way less quality than other AAA titles do and for way less slack. It's tiring. Pokémon hasn't impressed me since X & Y, and I'm even gonna go as far as saying that I don't appreciate the titles that have come after those even for what they are.