Hi hi! No need to apologise. There's plenty going on in the world that's more important than Hive Time comments!
From my perspective as a designer, I see the genre conventions that I intentionally buck as a way of expressing commentary on those conventions. Giving players an opportunity to brush against post-scarcity and discover that a solely growth-oriented mindset doesn't offer limitless enjoyment is something I wanted to do, in the hopes that players with those mindsets would start giving more attention to other aspects of the game. I can understand that that's a friction point, though!
I should note that the way that "birth debt" is handled was changed in v1.2-95, and my previous description is no longer current. The changes are outlined in this post celebrating Hive Time's second beethday.
Localisation is something I would like to do, but there are a couple of hurdles. The first is that it is a little bit bigger than it might at first appear - I haven't done a count in a while, but I think it's around 8,000 words, which is large for a small game that isn't text-focused. Humour in general and puns in particular are notoriously difficult to localise since that kind of content is steeped in cultural and linguistic nuances that frequently don't exist or have different connotations in other languages - it's doable, but requires a lot of extra effort and rewrites. Last, but certainly not least is that since Hive Time started as a jam game that I didn't have intentions of growing into something bigger, it isn't structured in a way that is friendly toward localisation - there'd be a lot of work involved in externalising strings and getting the project ready for localisation.
I would like to localise the game into other languages, but I don't want to do it unless I can do it right, and that requires a lot more in the way of resources and time than I can justify giving Hive Time right now.