The Playdate looks like what you'd make if someone only described the games kids made and shared on the TI-83 graphing calculator and then asked you to build a device.
It’s for Gen-X dads to buy and pay themselves on the back about “productive constraints” while they play games that suck.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
It fits, in my head, very much in that same toy niche as Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operator series of music making devices: https://teenage.engineering/products/po