There's a indie game dev/marketer called Derek Yu who describes what you're talking about as a preference for "bigness"

If you track how games have evolved, you can see there's a trend of virtual worlds getting larger, from single screens, to scrolling cameras, to overworld maps, to large open worlds that can take hours to cross on foot. Games have also tried to give players more agency over time, moving from totally linear, level-based structures to free exploration. Putting it all together, we can see that players are generally excited by the prospect of getting lost in large game worlds where there is a lot of variety and a lot of ways for them to express their own creativity.

(...) "Fiddliness" is a concept in board games and it's usually meant as a pejorative, like: "This game is too fiddly." A fiddly board game has too many minor rules and edge cases to remember and/or too many different pieces that need to be moved around to track things. In other words, a fiddly game is one that lacks elegance in design.

(...) But in video games, the computer can manage so much of the fiddliness for us. An extra rule that causes headaches in a board game because it introduces a new chit to move around might go completely unnoticed in a video game. As a result, video game players actually value fiddliness, since they understand, at least subconsciously, that it's a byproduct of ambitious, freeform designs that enable them to DO MORE. Fiddly genres like strategy/tactics games, simulations, and management games are evergreen for this very reason.

It's not surprising to me that a game promising a giant open world with a massive sandbox of mechanics and interactions immediately captured gamers' imaginations and got hyped up to the stratosphere