I think the Pokémon generation before Team PETA the anime had a rival character that was way worse than previous rivals/ antagonist characters. A lot of the fans say that he is better/ more mature but everything I read of him seems to suggest more than the Sinnoh arc's writers were too cowardly to call out abuse and give consequences. In the Kanto and Unova arc the conclusion to the abandoned fire starters was that their previous trainers were abusive assholes, that their standards are not something they should be striving towards and that they owe nothing to their past abusers. With the Sinnoh rival the conclusion sounded more like "He is not bad he's just different. Ash just needs to prove his strength to the POS who was mean to him for petty and childish reasons even though Ash has been nothing but kind. The abandoned fire starter just needs to prove his strength to the jerk who forced him to use a life-threatening strategy that could have killed him if not for Ash's intervention and then blamed everything on him and abandoned him even though he won under Ash's instructions."