Has anybody seen smart breakdowns of the "core essential game mechanics" in play here?

I ask because I truly despise this kind of game. Universal Paperclips was great: smart, funny, thoughtful. But even at the time I disliked how compulsive it was. And now there's a vast swamp of low-rent "idle" games that follow the same template. The moment something starts to feel like that, I close the window and never come back.

I keep thinking there's something about the raw mechanics that exposes bugs in the human wetware the same way addictive substances do. Or the way gambling does. But the idle games strike me as a different class of addiction than gambling. Not about variable reinforcement, but something else. I want to know what that "something else" is.