I tried watching it once and didn’t get the appeal.
I would be interested to know what you find engaging about it.
It does an amazing job capturing what the world is like from the kids' perspective and, being only several years older than the older kids, it really captures the lost world of America in the early to mid 80s.
It's very hard to do both well, and then they add very well done suspense from the horror/sci-fi element. It just sucked us in despite the fact that the horror elements are preposterous.
I like it because that was my childhood growing up. I grew up in the 80s, so that's totally me.