So I was the kid playing SimCity and Civ and Legos and all these other "builder" toys growing up, …

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head on why I would rather “waste” time in Factorio than program at my enterprise SWE job. Because it’s closer to being a historian than a builder.

I’m in the same position as you, and I agree wholeheartedly. The one thing I’ll say is that I think 20 years is optimistic. I’ve been involved in a few huge, greenfield projects that were mostly building new things from the ground up. There was an air of “true” building around. But it was astonishing how quickly that faded away. It took less than a year after our first launch for a lot of people to start leaving the team, citing reasons like their job was now just drudgery maintenance work or small feature adjustments, which is definitely less attractive and inspiring. And that is reinforced by career paths as well. See: the trope about Google promotions based on new launches, not bugs fixed. And people definitely idolize “the engineer that built Linux” more than “the engineer that has patched 1000 linux bugs”.

I've noticed some weird things. It seems that a few decades ago technological progress was about building the future we saw in Sci-Fi. Trying to build the things we dreamed and saw. But now it seems we just try to make hardware faster and smaller or software more... subscription-y. Even all the AI stuff isn't building these Star Trek, Star Wars, whatever like futures, unless we're talking about the dystopian near Sci-Fis of Black Mirror. I've also noticed that people are far more pessimistic about the future and at least in my social circles, I know far fewer people that read books or watch movies anymore. There's fewer people I know engaging in these world building activities, even in technological circles. There are definitely plenty, but these are never the people leading teams or even seem to be allowed to try many of their ideas. I think the thing is Silicon Valley stopped dreaming …

Ok, so why don't you build things for fun that affect the real world outside of your office job? And before you tell me you are too tired of coding from your day job, which is the cliche response to this question, you can do anything, even woodworking, it just has to affect the real world and not a video game.