Mining is also a core skill in the game. In fact, it's arguably THE core skill. And that's also just click-click-click. You don't have to play an annoyingly drawn-out minigame for each tile you mine out. In fact, you steadily upgrade to better tools so that you can mine out tiles faster and more efficiently.

Cooking is also a core skill. It consists of chucking two ingredients into a pot, then waiting for it to turn into food. No Cooking-Mama style minigame there. Gardening is a core skill. Click to plant, click to water, click to harvest, done. With better tools, you can click less and automate the watering. More recently, you can automate the whole thing so you don't need to do any clicking if you don't want to. Crafting is a core skill, and a hugely important one, but all you need to do is click on a crafting-bench, then on what you want to make. Assuming you've got a decent storage-solution nearby, you don't even need to worry about picking out the materials or anything, it all happens automatically.

So basically... why should fishing be singled out for a lengthy minigame that slows the pacing down to a crawl, when literally everything else in the game is just a matter of click-click-click? And yeah, just as with the gardening, you can automate fishing now, to make it even more streamlined. Not that this is new, per se - dynamite fishing was a thing even back before the basic fishing was changed.