Your remark raises a question : how much of your daily work is truely original ?
Unless you work in R&D i've got some bad news for you..
You don't have to be a researcher to do original work. Out of ten people on my team one has a PhD, but we're all doing more-or-less unique work a large fraction of the time.
Why shouldn't they be? They achieved their goal. There is little shame in cloning something.
Apologies for the misunderstanding, I just caught the typo, should have read "ala wordle", not "aka wordle", the game is fully original.
Using AI enabled me to spend more time thinking about game mechanics.