If Factorio feels too much like work, then this is going to feel... exactly like work.
And then it hit me, it was pretty much work haha
I played the game, and after a while I was miserable playing it, but I just couldn't convince myself to just put it aside and not finish it. Once I launched a single rocket, thus "completing" the game, I closed it, uninstalled it, wrote a negative review on Steam, and never have had any desire to play it again.
It may seem inflammatory, but my honest opinion on what the difference is between me and people who genuinely liked the game is this: those people are complexity fetishists.
[0] the kind of brain that generally ends up doing programming or IT work because it is suited to this kind of problem solving.