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.