there's a lot of pleasure in mechanical exercise, it's the reason people go to the gym or play starcraft. You don't really need to be good at chess to get fun out of calculating chess moves. It's true that it's like solving puzzles, but puzzles are very popular! It's like working out for your brain. Even at the GM level by the way chess is really 99% tactics. It's not like some 4X strategy game, it's by its nature almost always concrete.

And because everyone can blunder at low level play a blunder doesn't mean you lose the game. It's with higher ELO that the game starts to become more punishing.

And you definitely can get to a good strength as an adult. 2000 is strong club level, which if you really want to do it is a few years of dedicated training. And even at your average club rating of say 1700-1800 you can play decent games.