The payoff for humanity right now is that it gives people something to do while they're bored and socially isolated.

My favorite unrealistic and whimsical solution to the pandemic is for the government to buy everyone a copy of Factorio (maybe a laptop too if they don't have one) and have vaccine eligibility order determined by how fast you launch a rocket. The entire country has a momentary national obsession with non-deadlocking rail systems, and in a couple weeks the pandemic is over because no one has left their house in that time.

I do think Factorio is a good tool for understanding and appreciating supply chains and logistics. It's amazing to me that there are real-world factories producing real-world complex products like cars, and the whole process is far more complex than some optimized rocket control module production setup in Factorio. It's something most people just don't interact with, except as a consumer of the final product or maybe they have a job contributing to some tiny part of the entire production system.