If I weren’t already a Pokémon fan I wouldn’t have bothered with Palworld, because I don’t care much for Ark (the game whose loop it largely duplicates).
And the fact that Game Freak can’t seem to code a mainline Pokémon game that runs well on Switch certainly did help whet my appetite. If I’d been more satisfied with Sword/Shield or Scarlet/Violet, I probably wouldn’t have jumped on this one. Unfortunately, neither runs very well—particularly Scarlet/Violet, which was dumped rough and flat out abandoned for performance patches.
As the other commenter said, Palworld is not all that dissimilar to the open-world title Arceus, which is coded competently enough. But I like having more to do in my open world than just fulfilling challenge lists. If there’s story in Arceus, I peeled off out of boredom well before it presented itself. At least in Palworld I can build a base, etc.
So yes, my interest absolutely had something to do with the decline in Pokémon games for this latest generation.
It may surprise you to know that a) gamers cross genres on a regular basis and b) the Pokémon franchise itself is multi-genre (the card game, Snap, and Go! being big obvious examples). Genres basically just don’t matter to this equation. We’re here for the monsters.