Speaking of 'niche genre', casual gamers actually love playing F2P western VNs on mobile.
Episode, for example, has 50M+ installs.
Choices has 10M+ installs. Even Ubisoft has
their own take with 1M+ installs. Do they have high quality stories or CG backgrounds compared to the Steins or Higurashis? Most definitely not. But apparently a lot of people love playing them.
Edit: I just browsed throught the edited top tweet; I'm sure the 'guardians of genre' wouldn't consider those games as 'real VNs.'
I am one of these people!
There's a French (I think?) otome series called "Is it love?" with various scenarios, that is VERY successful on phones too.
It's mostly the availability and the obvious catering to a target group that isn't used to being catered too (and really enjoys it!).
Those phone VNs are basically in the tradition of those pulpy smut novels they used to have in book stores (when books stores were still a thing), with bare chested pirates on them, blonde mane flowing in the wind... They are good, trashy fun (some more so than others), and they borderline on parody in a weird selfaware touch more often than not.
(Funnily enough, KFC actually made a parody of those books before as well:
Apparently the book is pretty fun, so I'm looking forward to the game as well.)
I don't think those books ever held anyone back from reading "serious" books too, in the same vein that those trashy Otome wouldn't hold anyone back from trying some better ones if that was what they looked for. I think "Choices" isn't half bad for example.
The fact that people draw this harsh line between them and "good VNs" might be more of a turn off for people enjoying them, then the games being trashy. "No, this is a serious game, you wouldn't like it, because you only like trashy, fun stuff."
The actual issue that people have seems to be that there's no real discussion about the "good" stuff in media, since the wacky stuff will always generate more clicks. Even the discussion of well done Romance Sims like Dream Daddy led people into it with "look at this weird premise!!"
My humble opinions: It's not disrespecting a genre that basically thrives on weird premises, at least when you look at Otome. People come for the silly and stay for the heart warming. If this game manages to pull any of that off, similar to how Katawa Shoujo ended up subverting people's expectations or how Hatoful Boyfriend ended up being an intricately constructed tale of the apocalypse, then I hope you all eat tasty Kentucky Fried Crow.
(I don't think it will, but similarly, I don't think it affects the public perception of the genre any more than those other games did.)