To be fair I'm not quite sure how much they attempt to make starters "viable" (expecially considering HAs don't get released until way later in the gen), and if they rather go for "design first, stats later".I hate the hidden abilities. Ever singe Gen 5, every starter line clearly plays favorites and even retroactively played favorites for older Gens. And yet again they clearly are playing favorite by making Meowscarada a fast physical attacker with Protean, despite being a magician because they just have to have. It was expected to get an op ability, but couldn’t they have given it Magic Guard or Magic Bounce? Like you know a magician being magical.
Skeledirge looks like it could be decent if it gets proper recovery, but it’s kind of clear they wanted to kill its viability. It’s dumb that it gets Unaware when it doesn’t look like it would ever get Unaware in a million years, but hey at least Weedcat is guaranteed to be good.
I feel similarly about Quaquaval having such an underwhelming ability that doesn’t really fit it, but is the most fitting ability here at least.
We’ll never have a starter group like Sinnoh starters and Hoenn starters pre-HAs where the starters are relatively balanced (and yeah, Torterra used to be actually good in Gen 4).
Like, it's possible they just wanted to make "grass cat that becomes magician, crocodile but fire, and donald duck if he was made in 2022", and only after that decided to see what abilities would fit the theme, considering starters are basically "locked" to the starter abilities as normal ones, differently from other pokemon that generally get abilities for flavour.
And their actual viability is just an afterthought/consequence, and not something preemptively thought of.