In a way it does it's job of communicating what footsies is, in another way it doesn't. You see this with games like Fantasy Strike, where there's a lot of aspects of conventional fighting games stripped away with the intention of serving as like a training wheel game for newer players. This is mostly a misguided effort though. In reality, when you do this at it's barest it makes the game more esoteric to newcomers, because you can't grind footsies in training mode, and more experienced fighting game players are a lot better at dealing with the abstract.

This game is so simplified it somehow doesn't run into this issue though, the play field is too raw. Any person will immediately know what's up after fiddling with it for a few seconds because you can only walk back and forth, and the win condition is the same for both players and very simple.
This setup does betray what 'footsies' entails kind of though. On one hand, it gets the superficial aspects correct. Establishing ranges, general placement of moves, and shimmying. The problem though, is footsies although abstract/mostly game agnostic, is not divorced from the properties of moves, or-- some might say this is antithetical- jumping. It's not really footsies if you can't jump, as bizarre as this may sound. It matters in tandem with hitbox design because it's not footsies if there isn't some high risk/high reward aspect that works mostly in parallel to it. The 2 normals you have are a cl.LK and a cr.MK. Kind of bizarre but interesting choice actually. Except there's a baffling design choice where the cl.LK hits low and can't step over the cr.MK despite the motion implying it would. This makes the one hitbox interaction that could happen more shallow for no reason, as you lose if you trade with either of the 2 specials.

You can do a raw donkey kick or DP in this game, but what's the point? What's the point of anything if you can just hug the corner and wait til they whiff something? Actually participating in the footsies in this game is somehow a bad choice despite it being the main conceit of the game. It kind of makes you realize that a lot of fighting games don't really have any good reason for you to get hit aside from character game plans intersecting, which is honestly fine enough. I said that it kind of does it's job in communicating what footsies is, and it does approximate that. You could say I'm reading too much into it, but any person can learn footsies from like SF2. Kids did in the 90s. That game while having many of it's own complexities is simple enough to where 2 people playing it will over time have to develop footsies. It's necessitated by the greater structure of character kits and hitbox design. You don't have to make a full game to communicate this concept, but if you go this slimmed down it isn't exactly footsies anymore.