IMO there’s a spectrum that has Dwarf Fortress on one end, and, I dunno, like Factorio or Mindustry or other automation games on the other. Rimworld would be somewhere in the middle. On the Factorio side, most of the enjoyment comes from working out a really optimal base and looking at every detail.

In Dwarf Fortress, there are just too many details to look at them all, and the reward isn’t so great anyway. IMO it is much more enjoyable to just embrace the fact that there will always be too many details and, as you say, it is better to just focus on the higher level. The details aren’t really there to look at all of them or play with all of them, they are there to interact with each other and with the things you do, to result in emergent phenomena that (within the limitations of the simulation) “make sense.”

Or at least when you are picking over the rubble of your base, after one of those phenomena really emerged all over the place, you can piece together where it all went wrong.

Rimworld in my limited play time, seemed like I’d really want to optimize everything fairly well, and like that was actually do-able. So it while the games are pretty similar mechanically, the actual feel of playing is pretty different, and I can’t really compare them.