I think this is partly about giving yourself an out for liking childish things as a near- or young-adult. Kids shows commonly do include some Parental Bonus but extending that idea specifically to dark undercurrent plots that you have to read between the lines of the text seems like a way to feel “in the know” about something adult in the work while still consuming something you feel society expects you to have grown out of.
Then with a bit more maturing than that, you can hopefully just embrace childish joys earnestly, because joys are precious.

It depends a bit on what you want to optimize for, as there’s drawbacks to all the major methods:

• Ultrasonic sprayers are decently efficient but spread any contaminants around your home, potentially still biologically active. Dissolved trace minerals will turn into fine dust, affecting cleaning needs.
• Boiling for humidification is energy intensive because of water’s heat capacity.
• Air forced wicks are by default great habitat for mold and similar, so they need regular care and replacement.

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

It’s also my favourite place to kill monsters, take their stuff and use it to get better at killing monsters and taking their stuff. I do feel like it has so much build space to explore I find building without some reference to a guide frustrating, but it manages that progression well and the atlas passive trees are a neat way to let you customize what content you want to engage with.

Incremental games are a bit of an “I know it when I see it” grouping, but two typical characteristics are progression systems nested within each other and game loops that start simple but “flower” into a number of more detailed and mutually interacting ones over the course of play.
Universal Paperclips is a nice example, casting you as a newly built AI with the goal of making as many paperclips as you can. You start out able to make paperclips and sell them to humans for funds you can then use to invest in more capabilities. You work on building trust with the humans so they’ll let you do more things, and on making more clips faster, and there is a lot of escalation from these humble beginnings. Some other good ones are Cookie Clicker and, if you’re into programming puzzles, Bitburner.

This is definitely important in making the very most engaging base-builders - a pleasing mixture of longer term goals (manufacture this piece that I can eventually put in a future science pack or whatnot) and under-performing pieces of your older infrastructure that you have to scale up or re-plan is just so helpful for getting you into that flow state.

Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!

It’s the typical phrasing of social pressures to not stand out in Scandinavia, drawing from a book where the author phrases the “rules” somewhat as a legal code. Tall poppy syndrome is an overlapping idea that might be more familiar to English speakers.

Nobody ever considers Eve’s side.