I actually know of a similar concept that worked very well for a long time: Reality-on-the-Norm.
I think it worked so well because the first games established some very distinctive characters with distinctive personalities. Cardboard, yes, but interesting - and leaving room for added depth later, if necessary. The very first game established a tone. It didn’t carry throughout ALL the games, but without that a first distinctive tone, it wouldn’t have sparked so much interest.
Also, the style was kept graphically simplistic so everyone could join in, and the first few games were - inevitably - made by the same person(s) until it really caught on.
There was some inconsistency, but people really were OK with it. One of the most famous cases was the killing of a main character. That generated a LOT of discussion, but eventually people sort of wrote alternate timelines… or placed stories before the killing… and even tried to fit it in within a larger plotline. They also mocked the game which did it, which was indeed a game mostly fit for mocking.
Another cute example is that at a certain game, a new character appears. This character hardly talks at all, because the game’s writer was, frankly, bad at writing. Later authors used this new character - every character was fair game to all authors - and made him a very, very quiet person, whose thoughts you could never be sure of.
There were some sets of templates (as it was mostly a graphical adventure) shared around for everyone to use - characters, places, objects… but you could always use yours, if you wanted to.
I think this is a good idea, and the question is: will it catch on? The answer, as always, is: no way to know until its tried. But looking at RON, a successful venture (up until the time it got too much - nowadays people feel daunted that to really know RON you have to play 30+ games just to write a proper game, which is really not keeping in style with the original concept anymore where pretty mcuh everything went… I guess it just evolved beyond people’s control), I’d say it means some dedicated authors for the first couple of games, and the necessity of establishing just enough. Just enough locations to make a skeleton; and leave ample room for changes (the first RON game had a main street that was full of empty buildings that were later adapted into anything and everything). Just enough characterisation to make the characters stand out; and leave ample room to play with (character-types would be fine).
And naturally, the lighter the tone, the more participants there will be - at first. And then things would just develop. Characters would come together, good stuff would keep, bad stuff would be scratched (there’s at least one character in RON who just never really got used for anything, Thakbor). The game world and history would evolve of their own accord.