Ash PWC tracker | Bulbagarden

That’s kinda the problem though. Even with the battles back in the Normal class being 1 v 1, Ash had 4 Pokémon for a good chunk of it and yet Dragonite was only used in the last one and Gengar in the first and last. There’s literally no excuse for the fact that the writers had Ash almost exclusively use Pikachu sans using Riolu in the episode that Pikachu got jealous.

As for the comparison between Incineroar and Sirfetch’d/Dracovish, that doesn’t work due to the combination of the fact that Alola only has 4 Grand Trials compared to numerous opportunities within the PWC to use the both of them only for them to simply not, even outside of official battles, Incineroar had an active part within the series. Meanwhile, Sirfetech’d and Dracovish all but vanished from the Bea and Iris battles respectively until the Drasna battle with their involvement in anything happening offscreen.