I have tremendous love and respect for 80s classics, games that made up whole new beautiful languages to tell stories. I'm re-replaying Dragon Quest II right now, this time on NES finally, and I'm having a ball.
It's precisely because of that respect that I have no patience for folks obsessed with reinventing the wheel, who aren't content with understanding their genre and why it already works. I'd rather play a game from someone working competently within an established game vocabulary to tell Their Own Story than someone who thinks they're upending the paradigm without actually having anything to say.
Basically I started off reading this feeling very mad and defensive but it sounds like we pretty much feel the same way lol. I will add that, to me, "working competently within an established vocabulary" can sometimes mean upending established assumptions about that vocabulary. Michael Brough's roguelikes are all pulling from the classic language of Rogue and Nethack, but because he strips out huge swathes of the vocabulary at a time to drill deep in on specific elements, they felt completely fresh and unique on release. All the "formal" work in games happening that I most respect right now is built on that kind of design-by-subtraction -- I find that a lot more inspiring than "we took an arcade shmup and added deckbuilder roguelite mechanics" or whatever.