Beware of survivor bias. Factorio is a great game built by skilled people with care and devotion, I'm not knocking it. But how many other great games, built by skilled people with care and devotion, didn't get the audience that Factorio did, for whatever reason?

There tends to be an automatic assumption that if you didn't succeed then you did something wrong, and that if you did succeed than you did it all right. These two things are less connected than that. There is "luck" involved here (in quotes because it's more complex than the phrase "I got lucky" implies).

To draw any kind of conclusion about whether Factorio was a success because of its execution as a gaming project, we would need to examine a range of other games, successful and unsuccessful, to see how well they executed and whether that caused a matching amount of success.