Let's just agree to disagree, 'cause again, for me there's no difference if it's inhouse or from outside devs. Back then it was basically two big heads in Capcom competing for the top spot and wanting to outdo the other.
You're being too literal on the "killing", because even IF for example Yokai Watch would've 1up-ed Pokemon and turned into a huge IP bigger than Pokemon, "killing" Pokemon, that wouldn't mean that Pokemon would've stopped being a thing. Or is Digimon dead, for example?
Always this discussion stuff about semantics...