The thing with Paul is that people love to assume his treatment of Chimchar is how he treats all his Pokémon, when even the show itself has debunked such an assumption as completely false. Chimchar was the unfortunate special case in which Paul was so blinded by his desire to control Chimchar's hidden depths that he uncharacteristically tried to force this clearly incompatible "partnership" beyond the point where he would have just cut his losses and released any other Pokémon.Personally, I don't think Paul told Ash and co. the full story of why he wanted to have Chimchar. The bullheaded and extremely stubborn approach he had towards that one particular Pokémon doesn't stack up against the cold but ultimately professional approach he takes towards his other longterm Pokémon. And also, he never ever pushed his Torterra to rely on Overgrow despite that ability being the Grass counterpart of Blaze, something he would have known about when said Torterra was his starter. Nor did he put obsessive importance on other power-boosting abilities like Ursaring's Guts. Someone who doesn't hate Paul on impulse could figure out that something was very different with Chimchar's situation.
My theory is that Reggie's first Pokémon happened to be a Chimchar which fully evolved to Infernape, and Paul's whole deal with being much harder on his Chimchar than his other Pokémon all boils down to the one-sided sibling rivalry; he's actively and knowingly trying to prove that he's better than the older brother who "gave it all away" in the most direct manner possible, by having the better Infernape.
Thus his insistence on sticking to this Chimchar deal wasn't simply about having a strong Fire type for his team as he claimed, because he would have got that with much less hassle by dropping Chimchar for his Magmar sooner. No, for him, training his own Chimchar all the way up to heights that his brother's once-Chimchar never reached was a far more personal trial that held as much weight as his battle against Brandon (another moment where he stopped behaving rationally, now notice how both moments involved that big bro he views as a weak-willed quitter).
Where people refuse to think further, operate on pure dislike, and only make themselves see an abusive dickhead character who shouldn't be training Pokémon at all, I actually looked into the situation, examined the same character, and instead saw a troubled young man who had great difficulties keeping his deeply debilitating personal hangups out of his professional Pokémon training career.
He should be laying on a therapist's long chair thing where he can air out his problems in life, not laying on a bed in some holding cell as though he's somehow equal to the literal crime boss Giovanni. Moralistic-fuelled hatred only blinds people to the possibilities, explanations, and motivations that a cooler detached head can consider.
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