He told his friend about the game. I don’t think he would have done so if he copied or felt he had “stolen” anything. If he remade the game with this own code and assets then he put a lot of work into it and he can be proud of that (and telling his friend shows that he was). Comparing the game, i do think the clone is better made / more polished. So he really like the game and made a better version of it. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. IP has to be respected (can’t just copy assets or code) but if that’s the case then anything goes and that’s a good thing, it gives us better games.
Think PalWorld, for example, Nintendo, one of the most copyright abusing companies in the world, doesn’t sue them and it’s arguably a better game than anything Nintendo has come up with recently (no new / modern / good / 3D Pokemon games).
This looks much more egregious than palworld/pokemon. Palword has very distinct gameplay from pokemon and adds many features and gameplay elements that nintendo has never done. It’s much more similar to Ark if anything in terms of gameplay. The only thing it takes from pokemon is the fact that it’s a creature collector game and a couple of the pals look like they were generated by ai trained on a database of creatures from other games, but even that isnt conclusive. It definitely takes inspiration from Zelda, but again thats a few gameplay elements, not the whole game.