I'll start, with less of a discovery and more of a full history:
I think I was around 8 years old when I first got into them, so I can't recall for certain, but it had to be a mobile game, because all I had was an iPad at the time. I remember some of my favorites from that time tended to be arbitrary mobile games like PickCrafter, Tap Tap Trillionaire (I/A), and the classic AdVenture Capitalist. It's weird to see some games I used to play so long ago still maintained to this day.
For a fair while I fixated on a game called Cookie Collector 2 (now known as Cookies Inc) (I/A), with occasional brief interest in games made on Scratch. At some point, I learned about Antimatter Dimensions, and I was irreversibly hooked on browser incrementals. I think at the time I even went as far as disowning Cookies Inc, which was a bit extreme, but I was likely 10 or 11--I guess I wasn't able to comprehend the concept of playing multiple games at the same time. :P
I stuck close to Antimatter Dimensions for a long time, and played most of the mods that had been created, but I can only recall getting deep into the community of Dilmod (potentially broken now?). I don't think Dilmod itself served as inspiration for it, but while I was active in the community I created the first iteration of Tree Game, which was heavily inspired by AD's Time Studies.
After Tree Game, I (most notably) went on to make Tree Game Rewritten, AltTPT (the first mod of The Prestige Tree, before TMT even existed), Tree Game Reloaded, CLEANSED, idle2.html, Pipegame, and most recently, galaxy.click. It seems like a lot when laid out like this, but the games tend to be very short, and I've only published roughly 8 spread out over 4 years. It's okay to not be a constant idea machine, or a master of productivity. It's still possible to make some pretty neat stuff even if you don't have a lot of time or energy.
While I do agree that this is bad, I'm a little confused—what does this have to do with dead internet theory? Doesn't that relate to users being bots?