What I don't get is how seemingly so many people dream of making what amounts to slop basically

Take >>714320279 for example, it looks like a good game with passion behind it, sure a bit derivative but there's obviously a lot of effort and care behind it, yet the visual style is the most generic asset pack pixel slop possible, there's zero vision or art direction behind it beyond "generic pixel art" and the fact that the dev is completely fine with that confuses me

The dev likely played tons of soulful classics that made him want to get into gamedev and make this game in the first place, but somehow completely missed the fact all of them had unique visual styles that greatly contributed to how they felt while playing, and didn't even being to treat "unique visual identity" as a prerequisite for a skill to get good at to make a good game, and instead settled on and went all in on "phone tier Pinterest filler slop"