I think you’ve hit the nail on the head on why I would rather “waste” time in Factorio than program at my enterprise SWE job. Because it’s closer to being a historian than a builder.
We just need to make a market for "I'll pay you $500 to upgrade this save game file's factory from yellow to red belt", and have buyers and sellers, and then we can have it actually be a job. Because there's some parts of factorio I enjoy, and some that I don't, but that's the addictiveness of it.
This exists for several games. Probably not Factorio specifically, but games like WoW or Everquest have loot & XP farms where people just grind for hours to make a super powerful character for you and then sell it.
