It's sort of that way today, except there are disempowered wage workers powering it all and not-so-clean energy.
It's an aspect of the game I think most doesn't seem to give a lot of thought.
Throughout history, colonization has always required the demonization of the colonized people. Savages, barbarians, white mans burden etc.
Now a typical factorio player would be aghast for murdering humanoids to take over their resources ( or maybe they wouldn’t? Could be an interesting mod!). But we know those slimy brainless insects are just reactive monsters.
But even more... if you play the game, the early waves of the natives can actually do a lot of damage if you aren’t too careful, and can even kill ya. So the game instructs you to absolutely hate these creatures and to fear them. And when you finally build a base large enough to defend itself from hordes and hordes of natives, you feel rather proud, rather than feeling aghast at the carnage. There is a visceral hatred the game has taught you for these “enemies”.
They look different. They’re inferior. I don’t see any sign of high intelligence.
I personally assumed they were intelligent. I thought the game was making an attempt to draw parallels to the way real life colonialists dehumanazed the native people.
You could definitely read them as being more inspired by scifi aliens like the zerg, though. It is a very common trope for zerg/flood/bugger style aliens to be initially percieved as lacking higher intelligence, but twist they're actually as smart or smarter than humans. But that's not necessarily the case in factorio (afaik, I never got to the endgame). If they aren't intelligent, how does that cast the player's actions? I guess it puts you more in the role of being harassed by wolves?
Iirc correctly there is a factorio blig post somewhere about this exact topic, with the original author basically saying 'meh it's just a game mechanic'.
Then again, there's the stardew valley author removing pig butchering from the game for sort of similar concerns, so what do I know.
Why would they try and stop you if they weren't sentient?
In that game, how many players would stop if the native population were humanoid? If they were humans? If they would exactly look like the player? How many players leave some place for them to roam?
Building machines is addictive. And like any addiction, there is nothing stopping it.
We should be carried away because one day in the not so far future, somebody has to decide if energy is spent on food production or on mining for bitcoins or some form of product development simulation or calculation. Do we want to have the global ethics that choose the food?
Are mosquitoes sentient?