There's a sort of mini genre of build simulators stapled on to a simple shell game (which the OP is one of the main contributors to). It works well because the controls are simple, the mechanics that builds tie in to are simple to grasp, and it takes way less dev effort.

For this specific game, snake works super well because it's very inspired by auto battlers, so different units as segmentd doing their thing and being killed individually works very well with snake.