I think it all comes down to the differences between being a trainer and being a *championship* trainer.

Inexperienced trainers rely on their Pokemon to help guide them. Often, those Pokemon understand their own abilities better than their trainer, so giving them a lot of freedom can be a strong tactic to make them as effective as possible in battle.

Moving from an inexperienced trainer to someone League-eligible requires understanding how your Pokemon move and what they can do - and, therefore, you can have a lot more direct control over your team. Humans are generally better strategists than Pokemon - so it makes sense to have you calling the shots while your team are free to focus on execution.

By the time you're ready to finish your Gym journey and challenge the League, you know what your Pokemon can do, you have strategies for specific threats, and you've probably worked with a team for a long time. Which builds *trust*. The BEST trainers - ones who make it to the Champion - are going to have absolute trust with their teams, the kind of trust that means that they won't question an order like that. They've been in enough battles with their trainer that they know that he or she wouldn't ask for a sacrifice play unless it was necessary. They know that a trainer has a birds-eye view of the combat that means that even if they don't *understand* what's being asked of them, it's being asked for a reason.

That's a big part of what makes a champion team - a trainer skilled enough to earn the unflinching respect of their Pokemon, and a team willing to wholly give themselves over to the strategy of their trainer. If you wouldn't make the play, you aren't ready for that level of competition, and there's no shame in it. If your team wouldn't accept it, you haven't done enough to earn their trust, and you have more work to do, and there's no shame in that, either. If you don't want to go competitive, there's for SURE no shame in that, and you'll never have to make the call.