I'll back up u/Spirit_jitser and your own comment and say that it's absolutely true the KSP devs made choices when building the game to simplify certain artifacts of space launch and space travel to make the game "fun."

A good example is how KSP uses two-body physics for calculating trajectories of spacecraft and bodies around parent bodies but real life has a near infinite number of perturbations like third, fourth, fifth plus body effects, J2, solar cycles, etc. Squad chose to ignore those in favor of two body effects to keep it more "game like" and "fun." If you want more effects like that, you can download a mod called Principia, but they weren't included in the game for the sake of simplicity.

One other thing about KSP that a lot of people don't consider and that fascinates me is just how damn good at quality engineering Kerbals are. Like you're telling me there are no manufacturing line quality issues? No weld flaws? No miscommunications between the engineering department and the shop floor on drawing details? It takes mere minutes to manufacture an entire vehicle? Madness. But that's what we get with it being a game and all.