Why is there a trainer with a Meditite in Flannery's gym in ORAS?

So, about a month ago, my friend let me play his copy of AS at his house. He was in Flannery’s gym. I walked around doing the gym puzzle and I was seen by a gym trainer. They had one Pokemon and it was a Meditite. I was confused and he said it was because it has Fire Punch. I’m wondering if that is true or not. If it is false, can you say why it is like that?

Pleaselog inorregisterto add a comment.

It mostly lifted the teams used in the original Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, and in earlier generations of Pokemon, they mostly tried to keep the teams to Pokemon you could realistically get in the games. There were only about 15 or so families of fire type Pokemon from Gen I-III, and even a number of those are starters or legendaries. Hoenn in particular only introduced about 5 new fire type Pokemon (and three of them are the Torchic line!) so they were mostly short based on the original. They rely on Pokemon that could at least use fire moves since they didn’t want to overuse those few Pokemon.

Johto had a similar issue since there were only four ghost Pokemon (three of whom were one family) in gen II.