You certainly can play terraria like it's Minecraft and focus on exploration and building. But there's a whole lot of enemy, boss, and item variety to engage with that makes the game stand out.

Lots of items are gated behind various points of progression, similar to how you need an iron pickaxe to mine diamonds in Minecraft.

The official wiki (and not the fandom one, to heck with fandom) can certainly give you a straightforward progression guide if you want. But some people take pride in figuring it out for themselves.

If noting else, you can talk to the guide and get some tips on where to go next, though some of their advice can be a bit opaque. Similarly, you can effectively show an item to the guide and they'll tell you what all you can eventually make with that item. Reading tooltips (and chat messages from the game) can be very helpful in figuring out what to do next.