But see, for some people and some genres, the fiddling and trying and testing and redoing IS the actual gameplay.
BG3 is a good example, Factorio came up in this thread as well. And from a certain perspective BG3 is as much of a playground as Tears of the Kingdom. The latter hides the numbers from you, the former invites you to play with them.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I for example can’t seem to get into story driven single player games such as God of War or Farcry. The constant tutorialising drives me nuts…