Can't say I've heard this opinion. I have heard "It's not for me" and the like. I bought and played Stardew Valley and it didn't really click with me. That doesn't mean I have bad taste or it's a bad game. It means I game for different reasons.

FWIW most online content about Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley that I have come across was made by dudes.

If SDV was made as a “walking simulators” with decision making, would people still like it?

…I would.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but as another an example, I got into Knights of the Old Republic (the Star Wars MMO). But all that stiff grinding just wasn’t worth the rare view, music, or interesting character arc.

And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that more and more gameplay feels “pointless” like that. My brain can engross itself in Satisfactory setups, but after like a day I stop when I realize I’m grinding all alone. I get into Age of Wonders or Stellaris until around mid game, when AI civs get too dumb to be convincing.

So yeah. I think there’s a grain of truth there. I adore SDV, but some aspects do feel like “chores” just to see the passion and writing they gate.

Where do you go or what do you clean in Pong?

... Yeah, this is a common idiot dude bro chud take, can't argue that at all.

But I can say that a vast amount of games are mostly are or have loops of:

Go somewhere

Do something

Get a thing

Sometimes this is a fetch quest, sometimes its a scavenger hunt, sometimes its clearing out aome encampement of bad guys, sometimes its solving a bunch of social drama between npcs, etc etc etc.

What actually matters, to me anyway, are things like:

Are the going somewhere and doing something... actually challenging, interesting, rewarding on their own simply as the experiences themselves?

Is the reward meaningful? Does it actually change how you can do the first two parts? Or maybe open up entirely new kinds of actual gameplay, or at least just in game experiences?

Does the game offer you choices as to how you can do those first two things that will change your overall experience within the game world?

Does it offer you choices as to ... which things you will or will not even consider doing? Does the game railroad you, or does it give you multiple viable paths?

People will care about the answers to these questions to different extents, will have different answers to them, and those answers will have different types of preferences for the style, intensity and ... cerebralness (?) for all of them as well.

... though i do think it would be interesting / funny to make a game that... can either be played like the sims/animal crossing, or can be played like tarkov/mgs, and you could just 'win' through either kind of gameplay.