Games with less complexity are generally easier to balance, so one shouldn't be too surprised.
I'd consider Tetris to be far more impressive design-wise in that it's a easy to learn but difficult to master, despite its simplicity. It's a mind-blowing experience to watch the best Tetris players in the world. The skill gap between a beginner Wordle player and the best in the world simply cannot be that great, by nature of the game's design. I guess a large part of the reason is because the player can't alter the game state: they can only gain information. It doesn't allow for complexity to emerge.
That's fair -- I definitely agree that Tetris is deeper, in the "minutes to learn, a lifetime to master" sense.
Partly that's state, as you say, but I think it's also significant that Tetris is a realtime arcade-style game. Experts are vastly faster than newbies, and the main difficulty increase mechanism is that the blocks drop faster.
Wordle might have some similarities there. People don't commonly share their times, but I bet even among competent players who routinely solve it in 4-5 moves every day, there are some expert players who can do it much faster -- just like some people can solve the daily crossword in a few minutes, while others work on it gradually over the whole day.
You could also distinguish between people who usually take 4-5 moves and those who can do it in 3-4 (e.g. optimal play with its average of ~3.4 moves). It's just not obvious immediately because there's a lot of variance; if a great player solves it in 3 you could write it off as a fluke, and if a poor player is genuinely lucky and gets it in 2 you could mistake that for skill.
Right, if time to solve were included in the shared results, you’d be able to pick up on skill variation a lot easier, and players would start to regard speed as something to improve at. I think it would make the game more interesting (not that it isn’t already).
I'd consider Tetris to be far more impressive design-wise in that it's a easy to learn but difficult to master, despite its simplicity. It's a mind-blowing experience to watch the best Tetris players in the world. The skill gap between a beginner Wordle player and the best in the world simply cannot be that great, by nature of the game's design. I guess a large part of the reason is because the player can't alter the game state: they can only gain information. It doesn't allow for complexity to emerge.