The name "survival" implies a game where you are attempting to survive, but most survivals on DF don't have a real element of survival (Especially utopia survivals) and instead are mostly clickers with basebuilding. I think that's why survivals have a bad reputation, because the usage of "survival" is misleading.
the best example for this above post is Anarchy, you have to spam to buy blocks to build large stuff and if you don't, you basically cant build anything