Regarding Semantle, I found that Pimantle (https://semantle.pimanrul.es/) is a much more satisfying implementation to actually play. It provides a 2D visualization of guesses, which lets you see the clusters and lines of similarity more clearly.

This has Peter Norvig sudoku energy, in that it describes a game that is tricky enough for humans to solve that it's become a whole pastime, but is a trivial solver away from reliably defeating, and with a tiny amount of code. Once you see what they're doing with this, you're like, oh of course. Very cool.

I was hoping this would have some application for human solving. I gave up on Semantle because I couldn't figure out any sort of strategy.