Legitimately, if they were still making them with half as much focus on content as they were in the first 5 generations, I’d have no issue paying for the “same game” with new Pokemon every few years.
It’s that the price went up but the actual quality of the product went down. GameFreak used to give a shit and put real effort into them, then the lead director left and was replaced with the current one, and they entered this spiral of formulaic mediocrity every 2 years with increasingly diminishing returns, all the while slowly chipping away at player agency.