It's going to be far easier to get up and running and playing the game by connecting to official servers. But it will sure be nice have to a safety net.

It's nice to have in the worst case, I agree. My only point in all of this is for you to agree that there are reasons beyond greed to centralize servers. It's not always that they want to be the next Fortnite. There are practical budgetary and gameplay reasons to prioritize central servers. One does not simply ship a binary to the public and forget about it. It's a whole product they need to support and test along with every update.

I think devs get more information about what their players actually want if they look at how many people choose the unintended experience over the intended one...The only reason the unintended experience is a detriment to them is because they see it as a threat to their business model.

Again, I disagree with this cynical take. Games worth playing are art, and art is not about giving the audience what it wants, it's about an artist who has something to say that can't be conveyed through words alone. I applaud a dev who has the guts to say, "I don't care what you want, I'm making the experience I want people to experience". I've seen too many games lose their vision, turn to their playerbase, and just do whatever the players tell them to. To me, that's making escapism, not art. To me, the mark of a successful game is one where the creator makes exactly what they intended to, even if no one wants to play it.

The Factorio devs let you turn off aliens because that's their intention for you to be able to do that, and that's fine. And I defend your right to hack at any software running on your hardware to experience it however you want to, that's fine. But it's not an artist's responsibility to help you achieve the experience you want, and we shouldn't require them to. We can ask them to, but we shouldn't require them to.