Evidence wouldn’t be as concrete as source code, but there was plenty of evidence from data miners. Gamefreak kept moving goal posts when it came to why it wasn’t feasible for Sword and Shield to have all the Pokémon which is my frustration with that situation. I think they complained about the capacity of the cartridge the games were stored on was one, which was readily proven wrong. Dont quote me on that. But I do think the situation with the models was ultimately the case.
I fully understand your first point and that is how I feel. That’s why I made my comment; I and others have been dealing with endless AAA slop that mostly hasn’t been intriguing for a long time. Even if its a certain game franchise I’m not interested in, I understand other people’s pain of it been driven into the ground with micro transactions and buggier and buggier games.
Intel gave more detail to Tom’s Hardware and they updated the article up top. This still sounds a little disingenuous to me, like they’re still trying to minimize the issue with words and no action.
Gamer’s Nexus has a recent video with some possible explanations.
Por que no los dos? They’d definitely use this capability to do both.