Great post, thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I ran across this game on Friday, and I have to say - this was the perfect amount of challenge for a weekend to leave me feeling accomplished and satisfied. I loved it!
You mentioned the "brute force" vs. "finding constraints" balance, which I too thought about as I played. Maybe some of that came at the end, where the "i" challenges introduced an environment that made it harder to lock tiles to. There were levels where I felt I just had to try things first, but I think that's a reasonable thing to expect when presented with a bunch of interacting constraints.
It's a beautiful game. It certainly didn't need to be an open world with a individualized branching path for it to be a memorable and quality game to me. ❤