a couple years ago a friend of mine got into botting Diablo II, which seemed like a whole game in itself, which made me think, how neat would that be, a game where you start off doing regular gameplay stuff, and then you eventually automate/optimize that gameplay at increasingly more meta levels of play. still think there's something to that idea...
That sounds like the concept of Factorio: the abstraction level we play at rises with time. Most of the achievements are about skipping manual labor at various points in time.
Did Factorio have blueprints? That seemed like one of the greatest advances in Dyson Sphere Program, when you could lay down a whole factory unit at once; emphasised the move to greater levels of abstraction.
Mind you, I'd have liked a lite version that reduced the tech tree by maybe a third but still enabled you to get all the advancements without devoting your whole life to it ;o)
ComputerCraft/EduCraft which was a Minecraft mod with Lua programmable robots that you could craft and set to work for you, gradually. Sounds similar to what you're going for here.
You should absolutely not check out bitburner then if you cannot afford a distraction, especially if you like programming and green crt hacker aesthetic
