That’s definitely a strawman or just a straight up misrepresentation of what cookie clicker is. You only actually “manually click a picture of a cookie” for about one to five minutes, then you basically never click it again. It’s described as an idle game where you play by not playing, and the core mechanic is “number get bigger faster”. The game described in this thread is mindlessly clicking a button, no depth, no automation or acceleration. Just click a billion times to win.
Playing devil’s advocate, I can understand the point because I already think in terms of value per hour.
That’s why I can justify buying a less critically acclaimed game with more replayability than I can justify one that you realistically can only play once (starfield vs latest COD). And why I generally don’t play mmo’s because I can get a new game each month for $10, or play a $60 for a year straight. The total number of hours I have in a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 or GTA 5 is crazy compared to how many hours I had in the last battlefield.
But it’s not just about total hours. My first playthrough of Outer Wilds, Subnautica, and BioShock, were each more “valuable” than the time I spent in GTA, even though I’ve spent 10-100x the time in GTA. Then you’ve got games like Prey and Minecraft that have high replayability that is consistently high “value” time.
Games currently have an insane value/cost ratio. When compared to a theatre movie that costs ~$10/h, you’d have to have a phenomenal time. Especially compared with the cost per hour of a game like Skyrim or Baldur’s Gate where you have to spend like a thousand hours just to get the whole story of the game.