This is probably more appropriately said as "don't know". To give a past example, Final Fantasy 7 was pretty famous for having bad character models but it didn't take long for the same team to figure out how to make better ones. FF8 had much more real-looking models. Not many games today look significantly better than FF15 on standard console hardware.

Probably the "disaster" in the Pokemon game context is that Nintendo didn't feel the need to keep up rather than that they couldn't keep up. I get the feeling that the generation 10 games are going to be a strong counter statement to such comments. Likely in no small part because the people working on it are the same people who released the games which critics like to call a disaster.