@space-sburbian I want to talk about your tags if that's alright!
So, play for children serves two main purposes. The first is, as you have noted, is being fun. That's a very important need for humans, and playing pretend is a very effective way to have fun without any physical objects or resources.
The second is, as you also alluded to, to let them understand the world around them. I would bet money that the child in OP's story is either closely related to doctors or goes to a lot of vet/doctors appointments. She is emulating behaviors she's around a lot, and the talk of the adults in her life. That's her way of feeling connected to the roles of the people around her!
The same thing about the magical portal; a close relation works in some kind of tech support/maintenance kind of role, and talks about it/does it around her, and she wants to emulate that. (Or she lives with someone who is breaking things constantly, and she picked up that from their constant IT calls.)
Now, that doesn't inherently mean that she's not doing the type of super imaginative play you're talking about; like I said, play serves two main purposes, and the majority of children are going to have more grounded imagination sessions and more fantastical ones, but I don't actually want to focus on that.
Instead, I'd like to focus on the what our (adult, or older teen) perspective on play says. It is not a sign that play has changed drastically, or that the children are no longer creative, or that there's something wrong with us as adults. We are taking out nostalgic, goal oriented perspective and applying it on a current, goalless activity.
As we grow up, we tend to focus more on more on accomplishing (or finishing) tasks. That's an important skill to have and learn! But small children oftentimes don't actually concern themselves with the finishing of things, they just want to be doing something enjoyable, in whatever way they might be after. Children wander off of tasks constantly, partially because developmentally their attention span is lower than an average adults and partially because they haven't yet been taught to care about seeing something through. If you interact with children or parents regularly, than you know that 9 times out of 10, it's a parent who finishes the Lego structure, the card they wanted to make, the meal they wanted to help with. That's a developmentally normal thing for children to do.
In both instances in this post, the adult assumes that the play is going to follow the common imagination structure that we use for movies and books and such. It has an inciting incident and a beginning and a middle and hopefully and end. Children don't know about that, and don't care about that, so they aren't so pressed about making sure it's interesting to anyone else so much as making it relevant (and therefore interesting) to themselves.
It's important to recognize that for children this small, they still don't understand so much about our world. It might seem mundane to us, playing with our world as it is, but it's still new and exciting and special to them, and they want to figure out how things work, or express their own knowledge of how things work, in a safe space with an adult who cares about them, and that's why kids play like that.
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