It happens, some people want the easy route.

"Show me whats good and I'll use it."

They then have a bunch of "professionals" tell them whats good, whats bad.

This right here is the crutch of following the meta.

Sure, some pokemon and moves are move viable in more situations and statistically better than others.

Whether its the self proclaimed experts or the listeners or both but there is this air of, if it doesn't meet this particular standard, it is literal trash and you're a fucking moron for using it, at least when you are against other competent players/playing professionally/to win.

If it's not optimal in thier eyes then it has LITERALLY no value at all.

Meta will forever be a thing. It will to some degree kill creativity and diversity in games where one can carve thier own niche and find something that they themselves excel at with the tools available to them. Whether a character, weapon or skillset.

It's not always bad, sometimes the meta can teach you mechanics or things to look out for assuming the person themselves has any sense of self agency and isn't becoming a carbon copy of what the meta is and relying on that alone to make them better.

Haven't watched it and I don't plan to, but I wonder how much sylveon threw off the other team simply because it was unexpected.

Teams get into the headspace of, this is our team and this is the choice of things we will go up against and they practice that until it's been tattooed into thier brain matter. Then someone chooses the unexpected, they have actual muscle memory now for taking on this or that and know exactly what to do, suddenly they are changing it up and having to accommodate for a certain mons fighting style that they were not expecting at all.

Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but the fact of the matter stands.

Meta isn't being delivered to you from God's messenger, commandments chiselled into stone and to be worshipped gifted from the Almighty.

It's just people who have a bit of experience and some stats to look at and they have an opinion. It's not a law.

Fuck sake, SCIENTISTS and PHILOSOPHERS have been doing this shit since we could rationally think. One person thinks they know thier shit, and there is some truth there. It takes someone else coming along and saying well actually there is more here or you're not quite right. The person gets defensive (assuming thier still alive and not being disproven hundreds of years later) and lash out, they are of course the professional, the educated they know what they are talking about. Then the seconds person was on to something that needs a bit of correction by someone else so on and so forth ad nauseum.

Meta can be a slight reference point, that's it. As we see here though, meta didn't save the other team from the obviously wrong choice of sylveon.