Industrial capitalism as a comedy of errors. Your goal is to build and launch a rocket: to do this, you need to get embroiled in logistical yarnball extrication and cyclical resource hunger pains completely removed from actually building and launching that rocket. I briefly thought how well a social management mechanic would fit into this game - having your factory help feed and take care of a growing village, for example - but shelved that idea once I realized the startling acuity the game as-is shines on the mechanophilic golden calf of the elite. Human needs and desires are abstracted out of existence: there's nothing for your god-avatar to sate but the belching hunger of a machine intent on wholesale ontological slaughter. Elon Musk once joked on Twitter that he was intent on “speedrunning Factorio in real life”, which might be the only self-aware thing that genocidal ghoul has ever said in his life.
As an aside, I last played this game sometime in undergrad, and am now coming to it with a few years of experience in professional software development. If you're as hopelessly white-collar-brained as I am, you might find it funny how that experience sets you up for this game’s shenanigans. The constantly evolving scope of your factory perfectly mirrors the chaos of bad project management, and the only way to cope without going insane is making your designs as modular and resistant to inertia as possible. In the context of Factorio, that meant designing my factory as regimented blocks agnostic to whatever “data” (aka materials) flowing through it, with the actual flow of “data” being handled at switchable gates akin to function calls. Unironically some of the best propaganda I've seen for object-oriented programming, for better or worse. Will surely be a fun stimtoy to remind me of my career before it gets automated into irrelevance by dogshit LLMs.