As with other creative communities there are some distinct threads, like some people are into very heavily survival focused, up-against-it packs, where e.g. gravity works properly, mobs understand the game rules and will climb up to get you, or set fires, they will upgrade their gear, etc. while people like me prefer ascend-to-godhood type gameplay where you quickly dispense with monsters and become untouchable not far into play.
In the latter style there's not a desire for "smart and interesting NPCs", in fact it's often played alone or in small groups, intentionally. In the former style the NPCs are somewhat smart, but they're a threat so if you make them too clever they'll just always kill the players which isn't much fun after a while.
I think NPCs with the type of independence of a Dwarf Fortress dwarf wouldn't be attractive to either of the sorts of player I mentioned, it may be that such people just don't play Minecraft. But it's also possible somebody has implemented it and I've never run into it. There are a lot of Minecraft mods. Curseforge lists literally thousands of them, there could be hundred like you describe and I wouldn't have noticed.
Packs might typically have a few hundred of those thousands, I might play four or five packs per year, but often the same mods recur because they're so useful or well-liked, like Just Enough Items gets used a lot, so does Refined Storage, but some weird dwarf intelligence mod could easily go under the radar not because people don't like it but because they didn't know it existed.
I reckon a lot of people had never really used Compact Machines for example until Compact Claustrophobia took off, and in that the machines are absolutely mandatory and you use them from the first minutes so you have to get very familiar with them.
Whereas I rather liked some bee stuff. Maybe not over and over again, but I played Valdan's Sky Bees a while back and I really enjoyed that again, with modern huge bees and so on.
Most likely because actually implementing it is dead-simple, which is a major selling point of this technique. Short of adding it as a building block for non-coders in game engines such as Unreal, there is really no point in trying to prefab it. Most projects will be better served by just coding it in a way that is uniquely tailored to their needs and integrated with their game.
The long answer is that the game is in a managed decline. The target audience is small children so anything not targeted to them doesn't get implemented. "Smart NPCs" isn't a feature like that, so there is zero chance of that being included into the game.
Never underestimate how hard it is to create the game experience you want. There's a reason why a lot of NPC AI in videogames are dead simple: it's easy to implement, players easily interact with it, without being confused, it follows rules carefully crafted for the game experience, it's easy to debug and test etc. etc.
Also, how many games like rimworld, DF exist in 3D ? That's right, none that I know of. Making this kind of AI in a free 3D space becomes a whole other story. I think it works well with 2D minimalistic games, because the player uses its imagination a lot. In 3D you can't really leverage this. Anyways that's my 2 cents on why not every game implements it.
Noticing that an NPC has a work schedule requires that you stalk random NPCs all day. It works with the Sims, and similar games, because the game essentially forces you to watch them, and to be the stalker.
It's so hard to get players to notice the AI is doing anything that one technique is to make NPCs yell their decisions at the player. That's why enemies exclaim things like "grenade!" or "flank him!" in FPS games. They are trying to force you to notice the AI is doing something.
[0] four videos here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK6Vr9mcgjM&list=PL8t707flkq... and playing through the mod/ tweaking as he went here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8t707flkqpcAWeVeAUSh...
They are all tailored experiences to form what is known as the game.
The end result? AI programmer resorted to state machines, because it was difficult to control character's behavior. For example, there were oscillating behaviors without any advancement on character's part. Team lead had to agree because there aas no budget to tune each character needs and actions to make game playable.
I think this anecdote can explain why objects, needs and actions are seldom used.
A utility system is basically a codification of Maslow’s hierarchy: the system continuously re-evaluates possible behaviors’ utility functions and then chooses the top-scoring behavior.