As someone not in the USA, I cannot tell you how absolutely annoying and terrible it is when the website automatically selects a language/region for you. It happens so often.

“Oh, you have a Polish IP? Here is the whole website in Polish. Also, the address field will now only accept Polish addresses!”. Nah bro, I just live near the border. I wish I could select language by adjusting the path, that would be so much better than what some sites do.

Indeed, I think a clean workspace is a better analogy. The more you live in a space, the dirtier it becomes. As a place gets dirty or messy, it gets harder to live/work in the space. You must, at some point, take some time to clean, or you end up living in a hoarder’s house. There is a limit to where cleaning and organising has diminishing returns, and eventually, you’re just shuffling stuff around instead of cleaning.

The analogy isn’t perfect, of course (no analogy is), but it’s better than the debt analogy, I think.

It’s one of those mechanics that protect the player against themselves.

Obviously, without carry weight, grabbing every single item that isn’t nailed down, then going merchant to merchant selling everything is the obvious ‘best’ way to play. It nets you the most gold, certainly. However, pixel-hunting every room making sure you’ve picked up every bowl and broom isn’t actually that fun, moment-to-moment.