[WorldMaker]

This was never a technical oddity. This was generally a tool of verisimilitude: the real world isn't built on a clean square grid. You might have a diagonal hallway or a road that curves or a passageway between two "rooms" with a strange incline.

On the one hand, you could encode the hallway itself or the road curve or the passageway as their own weird segments in the grid. But then maybe you bog the player down in a lot of liminal spaces that don't really add much to the game. On the other hand, you could ask the player to bring or build their own map and pay attention to descriptive text like "to the north is a passage that seems to bend to the east" or far more subtle variations of such.

Zork and many other IF games were built on the premise that people would map things and getting lost or confused by grid breaks was part of the fun. (Going back to, as neighboring comments point out, the original Adventure which was modeling caves and caves have always had strange three-dimensional twistiness that doesn't fit a square grid. Part of the fun was discovering that disconnect between the game mechanics using square grid compass terminology and the digraph of the game spaces being more confusing than that.)

[projektfu]

It makes sense then. I haven't played zork for over 35 years. The last couple infocom games I played (Hitchhikers, LGOP) had more regular geometries, in my memory.

[WorldMaker]

Oh yeah, Zork itself especially is meant to be a weird place and the geometry intentionally silly at times. Some of the geometry was built to be logic puzzles for fellow MIT students. It's impressive it was ever commercialized, much less successful enough that we are still talking about it today.