I'm not sure where Minecraft came in the recent era of gaming...since it was built in 2009, that was well after games started being big on iOS, and some of those big games went for 8-bit as a way to maintain a modern sense of style and artistic quirk with the limited dev and system resources. Also, notch got some inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, which made an even more extreme sacrifice of graphics (the precursor to Dwarf Fortress was a 3D game that was too difficult to develop for).

Either way, who could've guessed back in 2004ish that pixelated retro games (including FTL, TowerFall, and countless iOS hits) would be what gaming would look like 10 years later?