Last year, I went for an explicitly useless project of this kind, which would probably qualify as an "elaborate ASCII art generator": ray tracing into ASCII graphics, in Emacs Lisp [1].
Afterwards, after (or during?) AoC 2023, inspired by both that project and AoC, I wanted to work on something similarly fun and useless, and composed a RISC-V emulator in Emacs Lisp [2] (RV64GC, but with unfinished floating-point operations; emulates a few Linux syscalls, so can run some programs, like dash).
Other exploratory and educational projects tend to be pretty useless as well, but not always so explicitly, and then questioning their usefulness may spoil the fun.