A thousand times this.
Most of my long-time followers know I started SAGE (the Sonic Amateur Games Expo, which started to celebrate Sonic fan games, but is increasingly a venue for indie developers to show their original games as well).
I retired from managing SAGE many, many (MANY) years ago, but I have continued to cover the event in some form. And when I was younger, and still felt like the Sonic fangaming community was full of peers and friends that I personally knew, it was a lot easier to be snarky and yell about how "this game sucks!"
But as I grew up and got older, my perspective began to shift to this "Everyone starts somewhere" vibe. Because, I mean, when you're playing a game that might be some 14 year old's first foray in to any game development, the fact they have moving characters and recognizable gameplay is at all is a feat.
Yes, Unity and GameMaker and Construct and whatever else make it so game creation is easier now than it ever was before. But it's still not that easy. And just like how a lot of younger artists start out by redrawing existing artwork as a learning mechanism, you're going to see a lot of first-time game developers remaking their own version of something established.
They are making an effort to learn something, and that's enough.
Say what you will about Todd MacFarlane, but he started out as a kid doing cruddy-looking Spider-man doodles in the margins of 5th grade school notebooks.
Everyone starts somewhere.
