Unfortunately, open source projects traditionally have a poor AI record. And when (sometimes, contrary to tradition) they make a fully-fledged AI, it plays at a super-expert level and ruins the fun of both campaigns and single-player, turning a simple walk into Saving Private Ryan. I'd call it "made by maniacs for maniacs."
Everything you wrote is correct. And the problem the author of the original post is addressing has a very simple solution: you and your bosses should eat less and live more modestly. Your medieval cable-bolt-fitters' guild should become less exclusive and demand less money for membership. The ultimate beneficiaries of horribly expensive electricity can easily live without three ranches and two yachts. And then people won't be forced to build this cable-flipping sham.
The same applies to the rest of the construction industry in the US. If they're building houses out of cardboard and sticks, they should be paid enough to buy a cardboard steak. And house prices should be low, not like they are now.
Perhaps you have already paid off your mortgage and saved up a million dollars for retirement? And you're not threatened by dismissal or salary reduction because supposedly "AI will replace everyone."
By the way, you don't need to be a 50+ year old nerd. Nerds are a special culture-pen where smart straight-A students from schools are placed so they can work, increase stakeholder revenues, and not even accidentally be able to do anything truly worthwhile that could redistribute wealth in society.
These were not "colonial possessions". For example, Britain had colonies.
And in the USSR, national republics were financed at the expense of the core of the country, where Russians lived. You can look up (which you certainly won't do) data on the standard of living and level of freedom in different republics of the USSR. For example, in Georgia, small business was allowed, in the RSFSR they put people in jail for it, but in Georgia, for example, you could grow tangerines, transport them on subsidized planes to the north, to all sorts of Norilsk, sell them, and receive in two weeks approximately the annual salary of a Soviet engineer who developed those very missiles, planes, etc. Of course, when the lights went out in the Union in 1991, all this Caucasian prosperity reached a civil war within a year.
By the way, I think that something similar exists in the modern USA, but the locals are blind, just like the Soviet citizens of Russian ethnicity were blind (you may not be aware, but not every successful person of smoked appearance from Russia is Russian), and do not see what is happening. When your Red-Haired Atlas completes his "perestroika and acceleration" in the USA, there will also be changes there, and perhaps people will also begin to see what they did not notice before. Well, that is, if there will be someone to do so.