People have said the same thing about music forever. Chess, which is just 16 pieces on an 8x8 board, famously has more possible game sequences than their are atoms in the universe. And modern video games have infinitely more variables than just 16 pieces constrained to 64 tiles.
Chess is thousands of years old, but many popular variants like Fischer random or blitz are recent developments. Even auto chess is technically inspired by chess and now has millions of active players.
Despite borrowing principles from the original chess (which itself has changed quite a bit since inception) each of these games is substantially different from one another. You can call them recycled ideas, but I would just call it innovation.