quickly went looking but very hard to find images or videos of actual game play. mostly talking heads on yt or walls of text.

The way that the game's instigating motivation is described, that "pick up and go" impatience, is exactly how Runescape used to be. Runescape had such a massive audience of children playing it because it was so stupidly simple. If you knew how to click a mouse you knew how to play the game. Almost everything just involved clicking something once with no keyboard modifiers or context sensitivity. It played in the browser, and the time it took the game to load was usually how long it took for a webpage to load anyways.

That's really the crux of how to make a game that people flock to. Make something where the surface level is so uncomplicated a lobotomized goldfish can use it. But make that interact with a complicated rat's nest of second, third, and even fourth layer mechanics so people enjoy digging through it all. DOOM, Runescape, Tetris, Pokemon, Bejeweled, and Binding Of Isaac all do it (or did, in Runescape's case) and people are still playing all of them even decades later.

Did SimpleMMO avoid the web bloat? Then I might give it a try. Seems it's similar to Torn City (torn.com). However the Torn website is absurdly CPU-intensive for a text-based game, everything takes seconds to load on 10y old machine. And they are sometimes victim to their own success, servers cause more lag on top of that during citywide events.