Don't get me started on the survival genre where 99% thrown into it are nothing more than just games with superficial survival elements. I'm going to stop myself right here before I write a whole essay on survival games. I'll talk about crafting instead.

I think the issue why most crafting games feel the same is because crafting, as the process of putting things together, isn't particularly fun especially when done in repetitions. I imagine most people don't enjoy putting together IKEA furniture, but even the ones who do probably won't find it enjoyable when you're putting together the same piece of furniture for the 10th time. That would be in game crafting in a nutshell. You'll be repeating the same moves over and over and over until all that is left of the crafting process is tedium. Factor in that for developers that would mean making a minigame within a game and it becomes pretty apparent while developers prefer to not implement the process of crafting into games. So what can developers do to replace the process? There are two options. You give players the tools to automate crafting and that's how you get the factory builder games. The other option is to rip out the entire process and you get "in menu crafting", which is what 99% of not factory builder crafting games use. Since crafting boils down to 1) find materials 2) craft the thing and you remove step 2 all you have left is step 1 and that again is not something you can do in a particularly interesting way. That leads to almost all crafting systems feeling the same.

I don't think developers are copy pasting the systems, I think there's just not a lot of design space unless you tip your toes into tedium.