Now what I mean by this is. Why is the game world divided into “plains” instead of having the world gradually ascend or descend?
To give an example try looking at cube world. I know that this is another type of game - but still.
Because that is the art style the devs have chosen
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There’s been quite a bit of debate over this. Part of this is that the game’s world-generation engine is still pretty simple and young, and we’ll likely see more diversity later on. But the choice to give it a cube-based design with cliffs and plateaus indeed comes from the art style, as @Communistpenguin mentioned.
I wouldn’t expect it to perfectly stay like this. Without ascending/descending elevation, it will be impossible for the player or mobs to traverse the map without either using ladders, climbing, or flying. While I can see the goblins we currently have doing the first and/or second, the new mobs planned to be added soon (such as the gator) will need gradual ramps of terrain in order to avoid being refrained to one plateau/elevation.
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Never played cube world, but looking at images on google, it appears that the terrain in cube world looks like the original terrain generation for Stonehearth. If you look at something like the original Kickstarter video, you will see a much more gradual slope in the terrain. Feedback, however, showed that it was tough to build anything large, and decided to use the current z-level look instead.
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Cube world is inspired by Minecraft, I’m almost sure the creator told it.
And Minecraft uses the “gradually de/ascend” except for moutains.
If you really want to get close moutains, dig them and make stairs.
For me this generation is really good for separating several things and it’s easier when you play from the sky 
The problem with digging mountains yourself at this point though is that we can’t terraform the ground after digging, so it looks like giant mounds of dirt. Also, extensive digging still causes some performance issues.
Plus, it takes a huge amount of time!
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