Worldbuilding is a hobby done by writers and RPG game masters where they create an entire world from scratch. They create continents, oceans, weather patterns, civilizations, cities, languages, races, even natural laws. Most of the time, this is for someone to run a homebrew roleplaying game in. You could say that the JRR Tolkien was the greatest worldbuilder of all time, and the greatest inspiration to those of us today. He spent his whole life forming the universe that contained Middle Earth, and is the reason his stories are so full of perceived historical depth and age.
Most worldbuilders today are in direct descendance from Tolkien. Dungeons and Dragons - created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson - spawned from the Lord of the Rings' popularity, the modern roleplaying genre spawned from D&D's success, and most worldbuilders, whether roleplayers, writers, movie makers, or artists, are very much influenced by RPGs. Even further, I'd say that RPG's are so normalized in today's society that almost no one is untouched by their indirect influence.
I drew this link to Tolkien to illustrate how D&D uses shorthand to describe the fantasy medieval world. Before Tolkien, would we have known that an "elf" was comparable to human height, shooting arrows and being condescending? Or would we have thought of small creatures who use magic and delight in helping others, like Santa Claus' elves, which are more in line with European mythologies?
Likewise, many medieval worldbuilders have the standard magic use, dragons, and feudal kings found in everything since Tolkien, each trope reinforcing the genre.
The tropes are so omnipresent that deviations from them form the description of the world. A friend of mine once created a steampunk society for a novel he was writing. Some of his first words were, "Instead of magic, there is..." I know of other people who, though enamoured with roleplaying and worldbuilding, rail against the Tolkienization of it, mostly due to high fantasy burnout. They created completely new worlds with new natural laws, but in doing so created something so strange as to be unplayable as a game, unreadable as a novel. They had unpronounceable names, unintuitive customs, unfathomable moralities, all in the name of originality.
So that brings me to the title of my post - there is a sweet spot of worldbuilding, at least when it comes to fantasy. Something that will, admittedly, unavoidably, be influenced by Tolkien, yet at the same time be original enough to not only be a breath of fresh air, but also something that can inspire. Tolkien created a genre, could I not do the same? I often think, and I feel as if others think the same thing. But like I said, it is a sweet spot - creating differences for the sake of differences is like Mad Libs for worldbuilding. (There once was a ______, who was a type of ______, who thought that all humans were ______.)
Studying Tolkien (and his influences) improves upon the act of worldbuilding...and writing itself. Knowing that he was white, and male, and a Christian, and eschewed allegory, and created the world for the purpose of a linguistic what-if, all goes towards why what he created became huge, and how it could be done again.
I know enough, in the creation of my world, that it is very derivative, but I think I have learned from it. Seeing as how I shall be running a simple D&D 5th edition dungeon crawl, I don't need it to be more expansive than it already is. I've taken the usual influences; set in a D&D world, elves will be tall and haughty once again, orcs are bad guys, and there will be kings instead of presidents. But true to the conceit of this entry, I have knowingly taken lesser known Tolkien influences; place names can be based upon history, sometimes changing or mutating, and I have tried to create original areas that are not too out of this world. I've taken the history of the world (the 3.5e game that I used to run, based in the same world), fast-forwarded 800 years, and worked out what happened in that time. If I was doing a deep, involved game and not a dungeon crawl, or I was writing a novel, I would have taken more liberties with the common influences. However, I think this is a case of working smarter, not harder.
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