Minecraft has reasonably limited game play objectives. There's a dragon you can go kill, and a couple of other bosses, but they're not really the point.

The point really is to explore and create.

It's popular because it's mechanics are simple to understand and work with for new players and even young children, but the potential for things to do is really limited solely by your imagination.

Imagine Lego.

Now imagine you have all the pieces.

Now imagine that you can play with people all over the world.

Now imagine that some of those people have created intricate block worlds and set up different kinds of games to play on them.

The games themselves are as varied as Lego players:

Some are world shaping where you play cooperatively, some are wealth building where you mine the local resources and “craft” them into other blocks, with the end goal of unlocking a new area of the game with new blocks where you can eventually get powerful enough to defeat a dragon.

A popular variant is player-vs-player capture the flag, where you re-spawn at your bed when you die… unless someone destroys your bed. Last team standing wins.

Another popular game is Minecraft parkour, where it’s a race through an obstacle course to a finish line.

The types of objectives to any scenario are only limited by the world builder’s imagination.

Some people have built functional computers within Minecraft that do a great job of visually explaining how computers work.

Others have used Minecraft to demonstrate city planning methods and their results.

Minecraft is more like Legos, i.e. a toy, than a real game. Technically the goal is to kill the Ender Dragon (or at least that is what speedrunners go for) but it doesn't really matter.

For many people Minecraft is about creativity in building stuff in Minecraft.

Same reason why Lego is so popular. You can create pretty much whatever your imagination can come up with.

Minecraft is an open world game where the player is allowed to do almost anything they want. In these types of games the player can set their own objectives if they want. This is nothing new. Games like GTA and Fallout have done this for some time. The difference in Minecraft is that there is no story and the objectives are an afterthought. There is an "End" and an achievement tree but this is mostly for tutorials and usually ignored by players. Instead people set their own goals and try to achieve those goals for themselves.

Kinda just whatever you want it to be. There's a basic 'intended route' or 'progression' but that's just there as a general direction to go in while you figure-out what you want the game to do. It's really open-ended and geared towards you being able to develop your own goals and ideas.

I, for example, really like collecting stuff. So, I gather stuff to survive and make a house with a 'display room' that works like a check-list while I collect every item in the game.

I also have a big cooperative world where my friends and I do city-planning and build structures around that.

There's also the most vibrant modding-scene I've ever seen in a game which adds tonnes of depth and a more 'goal-oriented' experience.

It just has a little bit of something for everyone. If you like fighting, there's the zombies, Dragon and Wither. If you like exploring, there's giant caverns, mineshafts and structures. If you like collecting, there's tonnes of hard-to-find items and blocks that only appear in special places. If you like building, there's a massive pallet of 'colours'. And if you like anything else, there's a mod to add it, everything from firearms and Rube Goldberg machines to Pokémon-hunting.

It's really popular because it's so accommodating and paced so that you keep bumping into things that inspire you to work with them. Add friends into the mix and you really start to spiral with creativity.

There's just something about Minecraft that feels enjoyably 'healthy'.

Minecraft is really just the base game. There are so many different variants, and some of them don’t even resemble Minecraft anymore. You can add shaders that change the look of every item in the game, so it never gets boring. Even in the base game you can play in a few different modes depending on how hard or risky you want the game to be.

Personally, I play it, because it’s daddy daughter time for me. I love building things in her world for her.

There isn't an explicit objective unless you want to try for the achievements.

The only real objective is to survive and build stuff you like. It's a bit like a videogame version of legos... only instead of a little brother coming to smash your stuff, you have creepers.

Want to build a vibrant village and level up all the trades of the villagers? Go for it.

Want to ignore villages altogether and do your own thing? Knock yourself out. Build that fortress of solitude.

Want to live in a grass-block hut and breed a million cows? That's an option.

Same idea as lego. The objective is to do whatever you want. I personally have never found any interest in the game, but plenty of people do

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To add onto others, beyond the base popularity of minecraft is modded minecraft which is significantly more adult oriented, adding dozens of layers of complexity to minecraft. Have you ever wanted to learn the basics of nuclear reactor design and nuclear refinement? We have mekanism, nuclearcraft, and many others. Have you ever wanted to program inside of minecraft? Well time to learn Lua and use computercraft.

Etc, modded minecraft expands minecraft to an insane degree. Me and my 50+ yr old father play it.

The objective could be to get to "the end" and defeat the ender dragon. The credits roll so you could consider that beating the game. But mostly its just doing whatever you want.

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