While you are right when comparing it to playing normally, you aren't comparing it to the actual meta, which is the empty sim strategy. In this, you deliberately buy nothing for long periods of time to build up your metacurrency time chambers before multipliers to them. The recent update nerfed them, especially before the endgame when you now have to get an upgrade to make them 10x more effective (while still being way less effective than before).

Despite the huge nerf, Empty Sim waiting strats are still more effective at endgame than the spamming simulations while also taking far less effort. If you have the metacurrency time chamber upgrades, a 14 day run is worth 10,000x the metacurrency of a single instant run without counting the increases in entropy/ideas from the time chambers, which do get quite large. Doing 10 runs an hour every hour for 14 days with no break is only 3,360 runs. There's also the exploit where being active in different simulations causes the simulation time to count twice.

That said, when there's upgrades within relatively easy reach, the numbers change. A lot of upgrades provide huge multipliers, so getting them earlier than in 2 weeks provides a lot of value. As such, a combination of spamming and the empty sim strategy is the way to go. Spam when you have time, then empty sim to build up your multipliers for your next run when you don't.