rather than a blueprint for telling successful stories or some kind of fundamental metaphysical element that all fiction can be boiled down to, i think the hero's journey is as common as it is simply because the common ancestor of all fiction is "stories someone tells about places they've been to". like, a report by a familiar person of an unfamiliar place would obviously have a recurring structure of "this is why i left / this is where i went / this is who i met / this is what i did there / here's what i brought back". the hero's journey is an essay format
I opened up cohost to check my notifications, decided to catch up on posts I missed overnight as well. There, I saw this noteworthy post on literature by a friendly creature named mu-suwi, and gave it a like. Now I rebug it for my followers to see, as I think there is much benefit to being aware of our story structures.