There is a lot of completely wrong statements here, but the chief one is - powercreep isn't "normal". Powercreep is a cheap way of generating excitement for new cards. One of the reasons the concept of "Standard" was invented was to prevent gradual and even incidental powercreep. Magic, which you seemed to have played, has pretty obviously "depowered" many times and it didn't affect the game negatively.
It seems you don't quite understand why I say that power creep is inevitable, so let me explain. To do so, let's imagine that each card has a numerical power level that takes into account its summoning cost, difficulty of use, strength, combo potential, etc.
When game designers create a game, ideally, they aim for equal power across all cards, which we'll set at 100 (in reality, this isn't the case; designers often intentionally make most cards less powerful and a small number of cards quite strong to better control the game and meta, but let's set that aside, as it doesn't change the outcome).
In an ideal world where game designers are perfect, we would have all cards with an equivalent power level of 100.
The card pool would look like this: 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100.
But in reality, game designers are human, so there’s a certain level of uncertainty that makes the final card pool look more like this:
104, 98, 107, 102, 93, 103, 102, 99.
Okay, but if it were just that, the difference in balance between the cards wouldn't be too problematic. However, in a TCG, cards can combo with each other. They can create new interactions. So when a new card is released, it changes the power of the cards, and our pool becomes even more unbalanced, like this:
123, 98, 106, 129, 112, 83, 104, 121.
And this is where the meta appears: when playing at a competitive level, we only use the cards that have a power level around 120.
Alright, I've explained why card games are unbalanced, but that still doesn’t explain why there’s power creep. Well, there's just one more question to ask: when designers create a new set, do you think they’ll aim for 100 as initially planned, or 120 so the new cards can be played competitively?
One might think that the first option is the best, and in any case, the uncertainties will result in cards as strong as the previous meta. But no, because as I said earlier, each new set strengthens the previous ones. If you design cards aiming for 100, you'll probably end up close to 100, maybe around 110 max. However, you’ll reinforce the card that already existed and was at 120 (as we saw with Pecharunt, which strengthened Charizard, or Dragapult, which strengthened Regidrago).
But aiming for 120 isn't a good idea either, because then power creep happens too quickly, and you end up like Yu-Gi-Oh. What Pokémon does is smart because they mostly increase the numbers, which means the gameplay isn’t really affected.
But that’s not the end. You mentioned rotation as a way to change the meta, and indeed, it serves that purpose; it slows down power creep. But it doesn’t completely solve the problem. As we saw with Mew VMAX, sometimes the errors are so significant that only rotation can correct them. But when that happens, it’s still problematic because having the same deck dominate the meta for two years is far from ideal. Rotation diversifies the meta, yes, but it still takes two to three years, so it's far from a complete solution.
In conclusion, to give a specific and recent example, when they moved to the Scarlet and Violet block, they had to create new decks to compete against Pokémon V, which had two years of support behind them. So they naturally made the Pokémon ex a little more powerful so they could hope to win against the Pokémon V. It’s just logical; if they hadn’t done that, we’d still have a meta dominated by Arceus and Lugia decks today, and the VMAXs would continue to dominate everything.
So literally - the meta can have boring games, where every deck is based around the same general idea (abusing some kind of broken Ability), but that's okay because there's a lot of these decks? You seem to look at a single metric and base your entire image of the game's quality on that metric, and how it affects you. In reality, any card game has a diverse range of players that expect different things, like to play different cards in different environments.
umm yes ? if you want to play with decks that look like each other or don't break the game rules. go play build and battle format or play with starter ex decks
Yes, this can be your takeaway if you read a single article about TCG design. The reality, as it often turns out, is much more complicated. Even the "rule breaks" you mention from Magic are, in fact, just more rules.
and the rules break in pokemon are also, in fact, more rules
Hopefully their cards aren't just boring Pokémon-VS vanilla cards!