in competitive COD, there’s almost always been 1-3 guns better than all the rest and that’s all the pro players use.
In yu-gi-oh there are always 1-3 decks at any given time that stand out top tournaments
Any chess fans here? Lmao don’t even get me started on the Anand vs Carlson Berlin Defense games it was legit the exact same opening over and over and over again at the highest level play and yet chess is one of the most competitive games there are.
in basketball there’s a reason why you almost exclusively see lay-ups
I'll skip CoD and basketball because I don't know anything about them.
But YGO is very proactive in enacting bans both in the TCG and in the current digital format of Master Duel, this last one speeding up bans from once every three months to once every month, allegedly out of popular demand on the monthly surveys to avoid meta stagnation on a platform that is much more active than any competitive format.
The OCG Banlist? We don't talk about that.
Trading card games are tricky to compare to our systems because a "solved meta" centered on a number of cards means people are less likely to buy new cards unless you increase the power creep and "unsolve" the meta, which tends to work once or twice but hurts the popularity and long-term viability of the game as a business model if done too much; basically, banning cards is good to sell cards and make more money for longer, so it's not a purely "game quality" topic like it would be here. Although that's also partially mitigated by the fact that over-centralizing cards that are also rare become expensive, and the companies don't want to ban them too quickly because there's money to make there too. MTG has examples for all possibilities in the spectrum; solved metas that died because no one wanted to play them, stale metas that are left as-is to get as much money as possible out of the expensive cards until something gets banned after years of waiting, rotating formats that are made to never stabilize and always require throwing more money at them...
Chess has no bans nor anything similar, but the closest thing I can give you is how the true top level of the world; that is, bots; are forced to play different predetermined openings each match to avoid getting the same results time and time again. This helps make bot-vs-bot competitions entertaining, is useful to gather data on each bot's performance and improve them further, but most importantly, it avoids the result where two bots play a perfect game of chess 2000 times into 2000 draws.
For humans, the opening that you mention is just "one of many options" nowadays, meaning that the chess meta "decentralized" on its own and is not a "solved meta"... at least not for humans, anyway.
Other examples of the game finding ways to change are rule changes. Queen movement, Draw rules, Stalemate rules, Pawn's ability to move two tiles, En Passant... all were added through the years to keep the game in a constant state of change. Many of these work the opposite way to bans; (they
add options to alter the balance of the game), but still can be understood within the realm of "actions that maintain the game from staying in a centralized, solved state".
In any case, Chess is hard to compare to other games because it's a forced mirror match where both sides always have the same resources. Pokemon is more comparable to (Collectible/Trading) Card Games where each player has to build up their tools prior to the match, then battle an opponent that has likely made entirely different decisions when building their tools.
I'm not calling Pokemon "tools", I swear!
My point is, most games "do" have some form of tackling over-centralization, as they understand that being over-centralized and in a "solved" state is a problem. In fact, an artificial way of installing this variability to keep metas active in pokemon would include ideas like
limiting the number of available pokemons in a given game, and/or
partitioning their availability to "shake things up" at given intervals. Surely this rings a bell?
Not everything that is overused or centralizing is bad all the time, but a stale meta with little room for change is bad, and over-centralizing presences can very easily cause this problem and always deserves to be treated as, well, a looming problem. And all games should have (and use) the tools to fight it. Specially games that have their high variability as a charm point (not talking about in-game "luck", but team/deck building and match up possibilities).
could be pretty nasty when it doesn't have to use tera fire to evade burns.
is my favorite abuser of this because it becomes kind of stupid when it can click Population Bomb into Zapdos or Moltres or Volcarona and not ever get statused (knock helmets early game. Maybe try 
if that's a real mon). Things like 
and 
are probably incredibly threatening on a misty team. Knock Off in general is cracked under misty terrain.
is insane under Misty because you don't have to run sub or worry about contact effects. Iron Defense / Body Press / Crunch / Heavy Slam is nuts.
with Fire/Ground coverage might be a decent example of this.
, which kind of checks every button of what makes a good Misty Terrain abuser.
with something like Bulk Up / Acro / Knock / Taunt might be worth trying, potentially with a grounded tera so that it can take advantage of the status immunity (Tera Flying is nice to shed the Fairy and Psychic weaknesses and power up Acro though). With Taunt you can probably just set up on Skarm. Maybe consider Trailblaze too. Bulk Up Misty Seed
is a little hard to figure out in terms of moveslots, but it checks every box, including having recovery in either Leech Life or Morning Sun. Bulk Up Misty Seed Guard Dog 
seems pretty funny because you're immune to phazing and also status...
. 
on misty terrain teams is one of the best 