For me I say that a truck with a cab longer than its bed is not a truck, but an SUV with an overgrown bumper.
The original 151 Pokemon had just as many bland, poor, and lazy designs as any generation since (and legitimately good designs, dont get me wrong) and anyone claiming the ice cream cone is automatically worse than ‘pile of goo that becomes bigger pile of goo’ is just talking through nostalgia
I think “pile of goo that becomes a bigger pile of goo” does seem a lot more plausible than a literal ice cream cone. I’d take more issue with the self-destructing pokeball pokemon, Voltorb. What kind of evolutionary mechanism brought that on?
Taking one for the whole of the species. Say everyone is getting tamed by humans. But if some member explodes themselves, then humans may stop trying to catch the rest. It’s like a monarch butterfly having a horrible taste. A bird eats one, and ignores the rest because of the bad experience.