2 weeks of turning my screeps code from a simple script into a system where I had a CI/CD system (on a VPS I paid for in addition to the game!) compiling Purescript into screeps JS convinced me the same, lol. These are cool games for people with more time than me, and these days I prefer just coding at work and doing other non-tech stuff at home. If I were 20 again though...

As a kid I played all of it, all the way to the end, without coding anything(simply because I didn't know how to), so it's definitely possible.

Also it's nowhere near as complex as factorio, it's more like a basic adventure game - the automation you can do basically ends with coding your robots to defend you and remember to swap their own batteries when they are almost empty. There's no production pipeline or anything like that.

Don't worry there isn't that much content in this game. You can finish the story in a couple of hours, will take longer depending on how much you want to tweak your scripts but it'll take tens of hours at most.

The main campaign is not that replayable, fortunately (unfortunately?)