I do think there is value in recreating existing pedals with Axoloti. Well, specifically, recreating certain types of sound or signal processing. The world of manipulating guitar sounds has been explored so extensively over the decades that guitar pedals have been a huge money-making project... almost any interesting sound you can imagine is probably a copy of something.
What Axoloti offers is that it is so much more compact, affordable, and capable of customized control. The control aspect is key. You can decide both the interface that you want (e.g. knobs or MIDI or whatever) and which things you want to actively control. With off-the-shelf pedals you are stuck with whatever interface they give you, and often it is both more complex than you might want and more limited.
I tend to be pretty impressed by the DSP wizards at Line 6 and EHX and some of the other digital pedal manufacturers. A lot of money and intelligence and time has been put in, in the industry, to find interesting and beautiful ways to filter and modulate a guitar signal. I do not own any of these pedals, but when I have tried them, there is a serious "wow" factor to the sounds they make and the range of options they can provide. I definitely think it is interesting to see how possible it is to get that quality and range of sound out of Axoloti.
I do also enjoy how Axoloti can make you create music in new ways with a guitar, which it absolutely can do. Like you, I've got my patches that are more of an algorithm that I actively interact with through improvising, and I think that's super cool too. However, if I'm playing with other musicians or working on a more straightforward song, I still use the Axoloti constantly, and usually I want it to replace well-known effects but in a way that I can actively tweak/hack.
For me, it is super cool that I can have more-or-less a whole DIY pedalboard with a few analog distortion pedals I have built myself, and the Axoloti filling in for delays, looper, reverb, bitcrusher, and so on.
