To be fair, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using Pokemon as inspiration, and even when not the fact that Pokemon is so ubiquitous means that comparisons will be drawn regardless. But there’s definitely more than a few Pals that seem to cross from inspiration to a suspicious amount of copying, and it’s more about wanting to support artistic integrity than it is about Pokemon specifically.
BOTW ruined Zelda for people like me who enjoyed the dungeons, unique items and narrative progression of older games even if it was a great game for open world fans. Pokemon is even further removed from that action-survival gameplay so it’s not hard to see why people would want new games to be similar even if the current formula is stale.