Indeed. It's usually only remembered by people fond of their childhood or hipster gamers making parodies of current 3D games as lame ADVENTURELAND spoofs to congratulate themselves like "look how far we got from our humble beginnings: back then all you'd do is type stupid commands, now I can press a button and shoot everything. har har".
Well, I didn't play text-adventures back in the 80's so have no fondness for the terrible Scott Adams-level crude games and only discovered the genre in the late 90's as part of web community efforts. Since then, I've got to know and play Infocom IF and they are indeed something quite apart from the rest of the era -- they had the right to coin the "interactive fiction" moniker.
However, I mostly only play the large body of work that has been produced over the last 20 years for
IFcomp by amateur authors. There's some incredible stuff in there, notable either for the prose, story, role-playing experience or indeed for a bit of puzzle-solving, and I fear gamers are not the ideal audience for it.
Thus, I resort to this forum, where people who enjoy reading on electronic screens is to be found.
Damnatio Memoriae is from 2006 and only yesterday I managed to play it. Prose is excellent as is the setting and range of possible actions and outcomes. Given it's quite short I found it an excellent way to tease people here.
I'll advise more such gems here... as you say, they really need more respect.
BTW, it's possible to play them on smartphones or indeed even the Kindle. But the parser really asks for a keyboard -- though I myself have been playing them on my smartphone a lot.