What do you mean? Corruption of Champions and Trials in Tainted Space is pretty decent, despite it having many, many contributors. Flexible survival, which has been around for at least a decade is still pretty good. Corrupted Saviors has pretty novel and challenging mechanics. Degrees of Lewdity is one of the more popular games on this site. Night games, which does not include TF like the previous examples, is also a solid choice. And these are just some of the ones I've played. There's plenty of good text-based games, I don't know why you're pretending there isn't.
It ultimately depends on what qualifies as a "good" text-based game for each player.
Some enjoy large blocks of text with every click, some like that it leaves room for player interpretation, etc.
My point of view is that the best text-based games grant the player with much autonomy, while a substantial number of existing text-based games are "flexible" but not "sandbox".
For example, the existence of crucial storylines and checkpoints which the player eventually runs into during every game. Like in Pokemon where if you don't defeat the Gym leaders, the game looks and feels incomplete. You can use different Pokemon to defeat each Gym, but it doesn't change that you have to defeat them.
Although every game would have its end goal, some encourage the player to set their own goals.
The Bannerlord franchise can be an example. The endgame would be to conquer the entire land, but you could also be content with just having a castle, being a marauding bandit, or a successful merchant.
Don't want to talk to this NPC? That's fine; the world can live and progress without you, yet your influence can clearly impact the game whenever you choose to do so.
Era games tend to embody the latter example.
The player is dropped into a world and there is absolutely no storyteller to tell you what to achieve, when to achieve it, and how to go about it. The storyteller doesn't grasp onto a bunch of maps and mechanics and go, "You're gonna do as I say or you're not getting this".
Nobody looks at a non text-based game and thinks "man, I wish this was a text-based game." Who the hell is going to object to adding more art?
I feel that it would depend on the game mechanics.
If the game allows the player to direct whatever scene they wish, having just one discrepant detail can break immersion (e.g. background, position, proportion).
In other words, the deeper the mechanics, the higher the player autonomy, thus more difficult to match the player's perception.
