My gut feeling is that the procedural generation thing in Startfield somehow absorbs some people’s need for mods.

Somewhat related. Since discussions about working conditions are heavily censored in China, people have recently started to use Palworld contents as a disguise/satire/substitute for it. For example, see this game media’s video if you know Chinese. Compared to the first world “controversies” around PETA, third world people are more acutely aware of the parallelism between Pals/Mons and their own conditions and thus people “just understand” the underlying problem rather than argue about what it is and what it isn’t on the surface level.