Plus the AI in Banished liked to screw you over, and not because it was trying to help. When one villager is dying from cold and just needs a single piece of firewood, another villager will take the last 10 from the stockpile and hide it in their house.

Never trust your neighbors.

This. There are plenty of games based on Dwarf Fortress and indirectness, though many of them seem to suffer from lack of depth.

DF is nearly endless in terms of new content and events; once you figure out a pattern for setting up your fortress and finally feel like you're winning, something new comes along that you didn't expect. Once that feeling of "anything could happen" is lost in a game, it's tough to continue.

Factorio is a good example of this. It satisfies the desire for challenge and survival like DF, but the challenge drops off drastically once you have a good setup.

It's tough to match the content of Dwarf Fortress for a game that hasn't been around for 15 years though.

Yes, this lack of depth is really hard to take as a fan. But of course most of them are professional works not life long works of art.