How do you decide how to value interaction? Dominion has some edge case boards/games with truly no interaction at all, bridge mega turn mirrors where not enough tension results over anyone pile and the player who dips into VP does it in a turn that ends the game. It's a spectrum, and some games get decently close to that, then on the other end sometimes it matters intensely what I pass with Masquerade, or there's this one cool game where I noticed my opponent committed to too many terminals and I can harm myself taking the Port split to make his deck really bad and get 'em.
A lot of these clones don't add any interaction, Arctic Scavengers undeniably has massive amounts of interaction but isn't getting market share for it, and no one wants to give Puzzle Strike any mitigating positive points for its heavy interaction.
I feel like interactivity is something people claim to care about but actually don't.
Interaction exists on a continuum, and the target for a strategy game is probably "enough that forms counter strategies against you, and you can form counter-counter strategies against them, etc....but not so much that the game is bogged down by it"
But interaction is probably valued in plateaus.
1) insufficient interaction
2) sufficient interaction
3) excessive interaction
For many people, as long as you aren't on the extreme plateaus, it really isn't going to be something that they notice or care about. And if the game is amazing on other fronts, completely botching the interaction could be forgivable.
"Tales of the Arabian Nights" is just an incredible game on all counts...except that there is no interactions, and that does tangibly hurt the game. It's better to think of it as a storytelling activity than a game, since each player's stories are divorced from each other. And people DO care about this one. There are several fan rulesets addressing this.
But just because interaction isn't valued as highly as it could be, that doesn't mean that changing the amount of interaction is incapable of improving a game.
For instance, the new version of "Roborally" actively increased the interaction between the players, and the game is WAY better for it. It already had sufficient interaction, but by increasing the likely hood that robots will be near each other, they improved the best part of the game.
I don't think it's fair to say the Arctic Scavengers interaction is not actually valuable because it isn't flying off the shelves.
It has variety problems that keep it from being an interesting game past the 10th play, but the reason I got to 10+ was because the interaction is wickedly fun. Every single turn has you thinking about your opponent, what they are doing, or what they will do. The contest at the end of each round is wonderfully exciting.
Paper dominion exists in a place where it has both too much, and too little interactions. More soft interaction cards like chariot race would be great, but at the same time, these cards get played and the game grinds to a halt while the next player finishes shuffling their deck and drawing. And a player with 2 cards left in their deck has to wait to see if their discard pile gets further junked before they complete the shuffle of it for their next turn.
Fortunately, sub-par interaction doesn't have a terribly detrimental effect on a game.