The article is a bit misleading, of course you can make a bot that can beat Pokemon, just like you can make bots that can play e.g. World of Warcraft, but you'd

The article is a bit misleading, of course you can make a bot that can beat Pokemon, just like you can make bots that can play e.g. World of Warcraft, but you'd end up embedding knowledge of concepts like trainers, shops, battles and probably even map-specific info into the code. What we probably can't do at the moment is make a bot that can learn to play any Pokemon-like game, with no specific knowledge of the mechanics, just by operating the controls and observing the pixels. For that you need to try a large number of strategies and see which works better, and "very little punishment" is a disadvantage when you're trying to tell a good strategy from a bad one. You'd much prefer being swiftly and brutally punished for mistakes so you can go back and try something different. E.g. how do you know that winning is good and dying is bad? How do you know that getting past a choke point is better than just wandering around town? How do you know getting stronger is progress, but reshuffling your inventory isn't?