It feels undeserved cause we barely saw any of these Pokémon training and getting stronger except for Lucario, and even him had a pretty lackluster arc compared to Ash's previous aces. All of Ash's Pokémon are super strong and have stronger feats than pretty much any of his previous mons, which feels undeserving considering all of his previous teams had much more training than the current one.
1) The scope of competition matters. In the previous series, Ash was doing a basic Gym Challenge. I think you would agree that the PWC Is on a much grander scale with far more impressive opponents. Even back in the anime, there is a lot of offscreen Pokemon getting stronger shenanigans. It's only safe to assume current Ash is much more skillful and experienced, plus, the scope of his training is much more significant given the nature of the competition.
2) In the previous regions, in most cases, we had Ash always catching weaker Pokemon and raising them slowly to a much higher level. This isn't the case in Journeys. Except for Riolu and Sirfetch'd, rest of Ash's team already started off at a much higher level than Ash's typical captures. So it makes sense that training would take them to greater feats compared to before. Basically, assume ash captures and trains Level 5 pokemon in the previous Regions and trains them to Lvl 50-60s by the end of the series.. However in Journey's, Ash captured a bunch of level 60s pokemon right at the start and trained them to Lvl 80-90s.
Dracovish defeated the pseudo legendary of a regional champion in his first battle, and then defeated Drasna's ace. All of this was done with barely any training.
The pseudo legendary part holds no meaning in the anime. That said, I fully agree regarding Dracovish's scaling in the Iris fight. Btw, Drasna's ace was Altaria (Which Sirefetch'd defeated. Not Dracovish).
Pokemon scaling has never really been logically consistent to begin with. Take even AG for example. When Ash had a Froakie, Alain already had a MCX and was Challenging Elite four members (Siebold) And was strong enough to somewhat hold his own at that point. The very same Alain spent far more time and effort training just Charizard and had some incredibly feats before the TOP. However, Greninja despite having a fraction of that training, was strong enough to push Charizard (Plus, people were actually expecting Greninja to even win that fight if you recall).
All that said, the anime has generally been consistent with the gap between Regional Champions and Ash. However, Iris cannot be written as a typical Regional Champion, considering how she scaled back in BW. She was written as Regional Champion because of the games and additionally, the writers clearly didn't want her to seem superior to Ash at that point as it would've made no sense. Hence, came the rubbish writing of having her lose to Ash's Pokemon that are generally far more inexperienced.
All that said, the anime has always been inconsistent in terms of progression and a Pokemon's strength has always scaled with plot. The only difference is, in previous series Ash wasn't scaled this high. However, here he has, so it makes sense for his team to be scaled proportionally.
Gengar, Sirfetch'd and Dragonite all follow a similar pattern to Dracovish, though in a less egregious manner. They got strong way too fast if compared to Ash's previous mons. Gengar had 7 battles, Dragonite had 5 and Sirfetch'd had 5, as well. Just for comparison sake, both Dragonite and Sirfetch'd were in less battles than Palpitoad, Boldore, Gible, Glalie, Scraggy, Naganadel, Melmetal and Kingler.
All of this is frankly irrelevant as I stated earlier.
In conclusion, while I agree that Journey's pacing and powerscaling does have some massive inconsistencies compared to previous series, that doesn't change the fact that his current team is
the most deserving (Outside of AG), when it comes to taking out a Regional Champion. Why? Because of feats. I still see people expecting Infernape to come back and take out Cynthia's Garchomp. Points like this just seem so biased when Ash's current team objectively has much better feats.