It was a choice, but one that doesn't appear to make much sense.Some of you sure like overdramatizing everything. Pretty sure they decided that interactions weren’t a priority and just focused on what they’re doing now. Call it the “Ultimate Promotion of everything” since that’s just simply what this anime series serves as, just show and voila. The 25th anniversary essentially solidified that if anything.
I guess it's just that we haven't really gotten anything better in return for sacrificing Pokemon interactions. If it were the case that we had a much deeper developed character dynamic between Ash, Goh and the rest of the human cast and a deeper development of them as characters, then sure, I'd get the reason behind the change of focus. But human character development/interaction is as deep as any other series, which is not very deep at all, except for a few episodes.
So what did we get instead of Pokemon interactions? Where did that time go? Mostly episodic and random fillers. That's the point. If it was used to further focus on PWC battles or, like I said, human characters, then it'd be a fair trade off. But that's not the case.