How are they different? You have some primitives like a block, and meaning is given by users to a group of them. The program has to care only about the primitives.

(Of course making it performant, not rendering/“simulating” everything and the like is exceedingly hard, but it is true that it is more of a “closed world” as opposed to some other areas of software development.)

This type of "creative games" lets users combine basic building blocks in the same way a word processor application allows to write entire books by combining a a limited set of characters. The limitations of strictly linear games like Last of Us are not because of technological restrictions but because it's hard to tell a cinematic story while still giving the user complete freedom.

I'm pretty confident Minecraft, Roblox, and Dreams are not following Casey's practices.

What makes you say that?

Minecraft was created in Java with ducktape and hacks and a lot of ugliness and perf characteristics which wouldn't fly past a pedantic programmer like Casey