Meanwhile I'm sure there's people out there baffled that anyone finds dwarf fortress challenging to get into.

I'm old enough that I've had the pleasure of handholding software engineers through their first anonymous function usage. Effect system, refinement types, totality checker? The best I get is blank stares before they go back to C# and JavaScript. These days I'm just glad they tolerate linq expressions and typescript.

It matters where you're standing for what feels incomprehensible. But then again, you can say the same thing about dwarf fortress.