I believe that anything that could be described as "cute" can get popular without an actual purpose.
Speaking of Pokemon, you can't really choose to not compare this project to Pokemon GO because for newcomers the idea of a game with similar flow to Pokemon GO would sound a lot more compelling than "a project that uses augmented reality instead of GPU mining".
in any case, the creators themselves say that they chose the concept of Pokemon. I do not understand why these arguments.
All I'm saying is that they chose a correct way to popularize their game. So, yeah.