Internet denizens love opening a locked box. This phenomenon has been weaponized by the gaming industry in the form of loot boxes.

It is strange to me that people obsess on programming in-game with "red stone" etc. That said I am dayjob programmer so the last thing I want to do on my free time and is to program stuff.

I made a game that uses the Luanti "voxel" engine (MC-likes games of course, but also transposition of other genres), and even programming that is bit of a chore but that's the price to pay to play the game you want to play (there's much more to that than just programming/modding; game design is a rabbit hole).

But I think that it would be more rewarding for those who are curious about programming to start modding, especially in Luanti because it is relatively well documented and it's Lua. In a way, making it rain with the programmable particle spawner the engine provides is a loot box locked by an API, with hints on how to open it in the docs ;-)