Thanks for playing it, and the honesty is worth more to me than praise would be.
First: your video did not attach. The post reads "Here is a video of me playing:" and then stops, no embed and no link. If you can get it up I would genuinely like to watch it. "Confused the whole time" is the most useful sentence anyone has sent me about this game, and watching where your hands actually go would tell me more than any description could.
And you did not miss something. You are the third person to say this, so it is the game, not you. After the second report I measured it: on day one, before you touch anything, the screen carries 110 text labels and 29 controls, and a quarter of those labels are just zeros and empty shelf slots. That is what "could not figure out what anything did" looks like from the inside. I am cutting it down rather than explaining it better.
On Hexatown, I owe you honesty. I could not give you a fair playthrough today and I cannot record video at all, so instead of inventing impressions here are two things I could actually measure.
Your web build is a debug export. The browser tab reads hexatown_worker_edition (DEBUG) - the internal working name and the debug flag both going out to players.
And it is heavy for what it is. index.wasm is 10.1 MB and index.pck is 513 KB, so a player waits on roughly 10.9 MB before anything happens, and about 95 percent of that is the Godot engine rather than your game. A release export instead of debug usually takes a serious bite out of that. For something described as a short incremental game of about thirty minutes, that download is currently the biggest thing between a curious person and your first tile.
Neither of those needs a playthrough to be worth fixing. I will come back with real play impressions once I can.