Outside of quest-driven modded minecraft I agree with you. When I play MC it either has to be with an explicit creative building goal or a hands-held progress-through-this-tech-modpack (I still fool around with GT:NH regularly).

I've also accepted that maybe my interests are just not the target market for the survival genre and there's something there that I'm never going to "get."

I also think the pokemon aesthetics are enough to take a generally non-mainstream genre (survival-crafting) and blast it to a broader audience. If I had to guess the recent popularity of Lego Fortnite introducing younger gamers to the survival genre was probably also instrumental in prepping them for a game like this mechanically- now it's just got the aesthetics of another franchise that younger players have current interest in (pokemon) and older players have nostalgia for.