Also a senior engineer. I tried factorio demo out for maybe 30 minutes, but hated the fact that I actually have to walk the engineer around and do menial tasks like resource collection myself. Why can't I just do stuff with mouse cursor like in most other top-down strategy games? Maybe the game changes in later stages, but the demo seemed to be full of nonsense busywork that is prevalent in survival games.
Independent of the thesis of the article, which is obviously terrible, it does get much better very quickly.
The "gather resources yourself" stage is like the first 5 minutes of the game, more so to force people to automate; I actually think it's an intentional stylistic choice to demonstrate how they are different. Like the first technologies one gets automates all of the resource collection in the game (and later tier resources can't be collected by hand). It becomes a pretty good point and click strategy game very quickly. In fact after the first couple hours you can basically play the game from the map screen if you want, using blue prints to put down large buildings and spidertrons as units to move around, without moving your main character ever again.
The manual resource collection aspect becomes automatic once you have a basic factory setup.
There's also a mod called long reach[1] which allows you to do most things without walking around. If you want to give the game a second chance I'd look into that.
To give an analogy with programming. The demo is more like setting up your programming project, which can be a bit tedious. While the normal game play is more like thinking about the software you're building, defining good abstractions, thinking about how to structure your code both on a macro and micro scale, keeping things DRY etc
