I think Hardspace Shipbreaker does a really good job of this. You work as an exploited blue collar worker, and the gameplay really makes you feel like a blue collar worker. Especially at the end, the plot and gameplay synergizes in a really creative way.
At the end
You form a union and go on a strike. The strike involves intentionally breaking everything. That essentially means doing the opposite to what you’ve developed your muscle memory for for the entire game. It’s a really cool twist on the normal gameplay that, up until this point, was becoming somewhat stale.
It also highlights the overall theme of the game, which is to explore why it’s so easy for people to fall in line with the status quo and why it’s so important to stay vigilant to company overreach
My personal line in the sand is, “do I feel like the developers wanted me to use the solution that I used?”
In my opinion, developers can design multiple solutions to a problem and it still may not count as an immersive sim. Because the key characteristic of an immersive sim is that there must be sufficiently complex interacting systems and mechanics that you can come up with your own solutions, independent of what the developers intended