I once made a web-based MUD game. The response in Korea was surprisingly low. I concluded that MUD games weren't popular in my country, and the people who actually played them were mostly in their 40s and 50s, while general consumers preferred GUI. These days, I sometimes think about whether I could make a MUD game that interacts with AI, but I wonder if it would appeal to a generation that has no memory of MUD games
Problem I have found is the barrier to get past that actually gets younger people to read something. I regularly have grad students at a top tier university just straight up not read my emails... Then expect me to explain it all again in person.
I think a killer feature for any modern MUD would be to incorporate an optional text to speech narrator for the large walls of text that are inherent in the area descriptions.