You are rewarded for spending resources by unlocking technologies, and being able to use the new tech to refactor and grow your base.

Still, I agree with you that there's some missing depth in the game that no mod has yet been able to fill for me. I say this after sinking (pardon the pun) thousands of hours in to the game and having a tremendous amount of fun.

Still, it could be deeper in some way.. not sure how.. maybe by adding some LLM/AI of some sort?