…where you spend the vast majority of your play time 
I agree. Maybe they should offer better rewards for those.
Immersion is good, and I like having it, because it adds to the fun. Like everything else, it has to be balanced so it doesn’t detract from fun. I’ll revisit that shortly.
“To make you wait” doesn’t go deep enough. There’s a reason why the game designers for those games want to make you wait. It’s not “just because”, and it’s also not only for immersion’s sake.
If properly done, it will lead to establishing a tertiary game loop that presents an additional challenge, a separate layer of fun, and something to get more skilled at.
But it requires proper balance. And that’s something that Funcom has proven incapable of, at least in this game. I don’t say this lightly, and I also don’t say it to imply that it’s a bad game or that I’m not having fun with it.
On the contrary, I’ve been playing Conan Exiles since February of 2017, and I’ve stayed with it since. It’s been fun – although that’s been changing lately – and I’ve enjoyed thousands of hours in it. But the fact remains that at no point in these 6+ years has the game ever been properly balanced.
And I’m not just talking about weapon damage and stuff like that. I’m talking about resource production rates, material costs, and many other things.
Just one of the many reasons I gave up on Valheim. They went too far in search of “realism”, at the expense of fun.
If you’re in it for superficial “touches”, then you’re right, we’re not going to find a common ground. One of the best survival games I’ve ever played is Don’t Starve. It was brutally challenging and tons of fun, not because it made me fiddle with stuff for the sake of perceived veracity, but because it required me to struggle to overcome challenges and find the optimal way to do things if I want to survive.
You’re drawing a line from my pushback against adding more grind for grind’s sake – and removing interesting choices – to asking for trivialization of the game. No offense, but I find that a tad disingenuous.