Factorio has provided a sandbox for me to visualize and acquire skills on managing bottlenecks in data flows; skills that I have and am applying as the point software engineer to resolve critical bottlenecks in multiple e-commerce systems. I won't speculate as to the commercial value of resolving those data bottlenecks here, but whatever dollar number you're imagining is, I suspect, probably missing multiple zeroes.
1000 hours since release in 2020 comes out to about 1 hour and 22 minutes per day on average.
Regardless of whatever "benefits" Factorio might have to society as a whole, one and a half hours a day of recreation sounds completely reasonable to me.
Understanding Kafka with Factorio (2019) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362179
Factorio and Software Engineering (2020) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24181783
Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone (2021) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591966