Yes I've been pondering it, I'm extremely surprised that no other studios have made an earnest go at it. The attempts I have seen have just been the usual game studio trash where they went woke and clearly had the typical DLC/microtransactions planned for monetisation. It's ridiculous how much of a stranglehold the woke ideology has now on game developers and it's like no game in the west can release without some DEI bullshit.
I would even be tempted to make it pretty low poly for the sake of making it run well, just have good animations and style then pour the rest of my time into the code. The temptation of being able to directly piss into EA's cornflakes is far too great for me.
Making a sims clone is a daunting technical and content creation challenge. There's tens of thousands of items in the sims and every person who tries your game is going to ask why you don't have one of them.
No one will want to play "the sims with less features", so you'd need to design a new compelling gameplay element that can't be done in the sims and do it well.
If you had asked me 5 years ago I'd be in complete agreement and wouldn't even think of looking at it, but with modern game engines you would be surprised at how it's not necessarily 'easier' I suppose to churn out these kinds of projects but it's certainly a lot less painful. Don't be fooled by the customisation options of AAA studios, most of them are just a variety of repeating texture patterns among other things. This is why I often snub any game where I see a huge amount of customisation in it because it tells me they spent more on that than the game itself.
People are rightly pointing out Rimworld and it is a great example, it doesn't have as much customisation but that's because it focused far more on the gameplay as any game should.
I forget what game it was, but somebody sold me a ps3 with it on, and for once in my life I actually bothered to customize the character.
by the time i was done, I was so sick of the game, I never actually bothered to play it...