The distinction I tend to make when talking about any kind of art fidelity type of thing(whether it's roguelikes or pixel art or lowpoly styles) is that you mig

The distinction I tend to make when talking about any kind of art fidelity type of thing(whether it's roguelikes or pixel art or lowpoly styles) is that you might not have art, but you still have assets. The procedural world generator: that's an asset. Different types of terrain and traps: those are assets. Stats and abilities: Assets. Special case messages on unusual events: Assets. And so on. And when you add new assets, you still add some kind of burden to the design. Roguelikes just hit those design challenges much faster than most, since they have a world model that makes it straightforward to get to the part where you have the assets and now they have to be tied together in some sensible way. Action games have it relatively easier when it comes time to do this design work: You know that the gameplay is mostly going to be about collisions, timers, and finite state. The bandwidth of what can be visualized gives you some hard limits on your design scope. Role-playing, in contrast, can keep piling on details. There's more of a UI/accessibility concern in good role-playing design, something that can produce interesting scenarios without resting on obscure details that the player has to sit there calculating out.