craft/place buildings implies a very discrete action and does not encapsulate the sum of the parts, the interaction between all these systems.
Simple building blocks don't mean simple programs. Heavily interacting components leads to complexity and significant bugs. That's just software engineering 101.
"Simple gameplay" does not mean that the experience of playing the game is simple. Chess has very simple gameplay (basically just: learning how 6 different piece types move, pieces capture each other, and protect the King) but the emergent complexity from those simple rules is truly impressive.
Compare this to say Monopoly, which has a lot more rules than chess, but is mind-numbingly not complex in terms of strategy and the overall play experience.
That is what linkdd is trying to say.
Have you played the game? That is, maybe, the first hour of a game that lasts many many dozens even hundreds of hours. Mining only happens in the first five or ten minutes. There are a host of other interactions, from tweaking object settings, optimizing pathing layouts, planning, direction of bots, to deployment of the factorio equivalent of Redstone circuitry.
And mods. As with KSP or minecraft, a greater number of possible interactions comes from the modding community rather than the stock game.