But honestly, if you can't pick up the basics of factorio in a few minutes you're less qualified than the nine-year-olds and sixty-year-olds I've taught programming to. No background in programming or software development at all. That's a very low standard.

And yes, I've used factorio in those lessons as a tool. It's great for teaching refactoring in a visual way with no code at all. I usually set a class homework project involving the factorio demo. It works well.

It's really not that hard to play factorio.

Ok. With all that said and even with all those happy experiences I still wouldn't use factorio for interviews because I think leetcode and similar are also bad approaches. Same with algorithm questions. They're out as well.