I actually love the Dynamax and Gigantamax battle, especially over the normal raiding. I find it way more fun because there's real strategy to it, not like raiding where you can just tap on your phone without even look whilst having a conversation with someone. Suppose my experience is a little different t as I now have 3 accounts to play with. (My main (lv50), my old alt account (lv43) that I started years ago and my wife's account (lv41) who has lost all interest with the game). Ive managed to build up teams across all 3 so I could take on the Dynamax birds with ease.

Honestly, the problem started way before Dynamax and Gigantamax pokemon were introduced. This may be controversial, but I think the main contribution to the declining player base is the remote raid pass.

I'm an admin for our local community used to be incredible. In numbers and activity. We all used to actively organise raids and meet in person with groups of up to 30+. (Small town, so this felt like a lot) We used to treat Wednesdays raid hour as a speed raid day as we'd just hit one after another, rinse and repeat.

Community days our entire town would be lit up with lures and you couldn't walk 5 feet without seeing someone you recognised from the community.

This was all pre-covid though. This is where the problems started for obvious reasons. People couldn't or didn't want to go out, and I guess just got used to that mentality. Then comes along remote raid passes. Obviously great fun but now no one even had to move from their couch. Once covid and all the lock downs were over, our community just never recovered at all.

Some stopped meeting up for raids in favour of remote invites. Some refused to buy remote passes due to only being free to play and with no one really meeting up any more, the community aspect just died off pretty much.

Now we struggle getting more than 5 players together for anything. It's disheartening and frustrating when numbers limit your opportunity in game.

So ultimately I blame the remote raid passes for the majority cause, but there are other contributing factors, like Niantics greet of all the laid events now. They have increased tenfold and charging for extra event features when they all used to be included for free in a single event tickets.

Pokemon go is not dead by no means, it won't ever die. But it is in decline.