That’s true, but the critical difference here is that we can just spend 10 minutes adding a popup warning when researching the first scifi tech, which the player can just use to decline researching it. So it takes basically no effort to limit someone to early space stage. Whereas the feature of making all kinds of new gameplay options appear when the AI overtakes the player would take a ton of development effort.
Even at that point we’ll need to consider the required development effort (i.e. amount of people’s money spent) on the extra features and how much better they make the game. So I expect that crazy ideas like this that would require a ton of development effort are purely in the realm of volunteer programmers (or modders) making the feature. And if that doesn’t end up happening then the feature is never getting made.