Yeah animal crossing is pretty fun.

As for it holding off a backlog of other things to play, it is in the same weird spot as Minecraft or The Sims where how you play the game can vary wildly, including how casually or intensely you play it.

It seems to draw more people into binge playing than playing casually but it kind of works for both.

You can have your relaxing game catching a few fish, catching a few bugs, interacting with cute villagers etc and take your time with it or you can focus on design to an extreme level putting lots of time into getting various aspects of your island just right, and everything in between. It does have stuff that encourages you to play daily with stuff being reset each day (stuff like the rocks you hit being able to be harvested again), and things that reward you for doing them daily as well as things that occur on particular days of the week, but those are things that really can be done in a short period if needed and you can still choose not to play every day anyway.

I think it would likely make you play more and therefore play less of your other games, but it might not because it can be played casually. I'm pretty sure I've played every day since I got it but you would also get away with not doing that depending on what parts of the game feel the most important to you.

It's not the biggest time sink of a game I've played (that's probably Ark in my experience which I enjoyed but stopped playing due to in game politics) but it can be a bit of a time sink depending on how you respond to it.