This makes a lot of sense. It's very hard to be better than existing products de novo. They have years of evolution baked in, tiny elegant tradeoffs that aren't obvious from the outset.
I see this a lot in indie games. Many games that do well copy an existing idea, with a few tweaks/transmutations to make it unique. Theres a sweet spot of similar enough to reuse the template (and not get stuck in the weeds during development), different enough to be exciting. Dota Underlords > SNKRX > Just King comes to mind, where the slot machine/tribe/economy mechanic is kept wholesale.
Or Slay the Spire, which has been copied to death in the last few years.
>The idea is to copy something that’s clearly working with some small but sufficiently significant changes.
>Instead of trying to go from zero to one, we’re going from one to one plus epsilon, where epsilon represents our small change.