My thoughts exactly.

We've been through such a repetitive formula with the exact same downer ending repeating itself, that Ash losing the Alola League is practically expected.

And really, Ash is the worst trainer in his own universe. He challenges more experienced trainers and loses to them frequently. He wins gym badges either out of luck or pity. He abandons his strongest Pokemon and replaces them with weaker ones (and you thought Paul from Gen 4 was bad enough for the exact same reason). And as a result, even at his absolute best, he still ends up losing every league he'd enter.

And it's that point, that nobody is watching the anime anymore, if everyone knows that Ash will lose every league he'd enter. Which is pretty ironic, because the only reason to make Ash lose every league is to continue the series into later regions. But it has the unintended side effect of turning people off of the series altogether if they're going to follow a complete loser from the beginning to the end of each region.

For a bullshit reason.