Factorio is an unreasonably good metaphor for software engineering. I think what you experience is a simulation without a penalty for increasing entropy and complexity too much, something that isn’t possible in the real world: The more you tower up layers of abstraction and increase complexity, the more the failure rate increases, so you’re incentivised to actively lower it or avoid some approaches entirely. In addition to that, you’re bound by natural resources, and money, in a way that you are not in the game. Finally, and that might contribute to the drain: You’re solely responsible for maintaining all the abstraction layers.