I’m blinded by the hype train, but with 2 kids and sole income my wallets to empty to pay for an 80$ game on release.

Is your leaderboard just who solves it first, or is there more to it?

If you like the automation in that pack and want a game similar you should try factorio. A more friendly introduction to the genre would be shapez.io.

The key word in this post is uniquely popular. This is most likely cherry picked data.