I have spent nearly 1000 hours in Factorio and to me this game was about planning, optimising, getting perfect ratios, then you hit hardware limitations and start experimenting on how to get things more optimised.
So yeah, you take from the game what you want to take, if you will try hard enought you can make Tetris look like an evil game about destroying bricks...
I recall a Mario vs Sonic article where Sonic is described as peaceful and freedomish (Sonic only hits machines to free animals) whereas you could twist Mario's story around from Bowser's POV where he defends against a relentless invader that stomps, fires at, and overall kills everyone in his path.
By that same token, Sonic is destroying Robotnik's personal property wantonly, where Mario is trying to rescued his kidnapped friend.
Sure, if you eliminate parts of the plot, you can twist is around. But if you include the kidnapped princess and trapped animals, it's pretty clear what side each of those characters is on.
I remember watching an episode of NatGeo's "Megafactories" showing a Coca-cola plant that could run a massive operation with only 17 employees. Everything beautifully orchestrated, everything so optimized. Yet, hardly what someone would say "the best allocation of time and resources that need optimizing".
Is society better off because this plant managed to reduce its unit production cost by 0.05%, or have we just ensured that we can keep getting cheap unhealthy sugared-water for a little while longer? Was any person that lost that job due to the automation now going to take the time to improve/acquire their professional skills and go on to work on better jobs, or did we just send someone to either welfare or some crappy gig-economy job?
If it was "just a game", sure, go ahead and enjoy it. But I would bet that a lot of people playing the game take some of its lessons and strategies as a model of how to behave at work in real life. And in real life engineers and executives should be able to ask themselves "Why am I optimizing this?", "Why do we need a perfect ratio?" and have answers that go beyond "it looks good on a spreadsheet"
I have spent nearly 1000 hours in Factorio and to me this game was about planning, optimising, getting perfect ratios, then you hit hardware limitations and start experimenting on how to get things more optimised.
So yeah, you take from the game what you want to take, if you will try hard enought you can make Tetris look like an evil game about destroying bricks...