There are some other authors doing creative things with the parser. Junior Arithmancer by Mike Spivey is fun, but not as narratively rich as Emily Short's work.
Andrew Plotkin's Lists and Lists also turns Inform into a parser.
I think a future LLM could accomplish these feats. There's definitely a theme or class of Interactive Fiction: call it "simulation" or "meta" at play there. Some classic works like A Mind Forever Voyaging used it. And old Lucas Arts games like Day of the Tentacle even embedded games within the game. So given those kind of prompts something could be generated in a couple generations.
Not to take away from the current work. They build upon the shoulders of classic Interactive Fiction while being more forgiving and enjoyable.